How to Run an Effective Meeting

Many managers regard inefficient, unproductive or boring meetings as an unavoidable business flaw.

Acknowledge that meetings can cause a lot of frustration, and assess your meetings to seek improvements.

Rather than getting rid of meetings, solve your problems with them by applying science.

Critically evaluate your meeting facilitation skills: Are they as good as you think they are?

Carefully craft meeting agendas. Make participants “directly responsible” owners of their agenda items.

• Holding a meeting for 48 minutes will catch your colleagues’ attention.
• Invite fewer participants to reduce “social loafing”; encourage input before and after from “secondary stakeholders.”
• Walking and standing meetings add variety to your meeting culture and ensure that people “don’t get too comfortable in that chair.”
• “Deflate negative energy from the start” and create technology-free meeting zones.
• Encourage silence to bring out every team member’s input.
• Pay special attention to audio-only telephone conferences.

Rather than overestimating your skills, accept that you might have room for improvement, and strategically seek out opportunities to improve. You can, for example, gain input by asking meeting participants for feedback. If you feel that approaching them in person would bias the results, consider sending around a short, anonymous survey. Collecting data and being open to that information will increase your awareness of issues, which is the first step to improvement.