- Thou Shalt Always Know Timing for Meetings. Great organizations (and railroads) run on time.
- Thou Shalt Not wander into other topics and forget the Main Reason for Meetings.
- Thou Shalt Remember the Golden Rule of Meetings: Praise in Public, criticize in private.
- Thou Shalt Not Convene Meetings Outside of Normal Business Hours Unless there is an emergency, keep the meetings to working hours.
- Thou Shalt Not Use Group Pressure or peer pressure to Log roll a decision. This will come back to bite you.
- Thou Shalt Not Use Meetings to Destroy Others' Careers. The old adage: “The people you step on, on the way up might be the same people greasing the rails on the way down.”
- Thou Shalt Keep the Personal and the Corporate Distinct. Some socializing is good and appropriate before, after and during breaks at meetings. Much more than that becomes self-defeating.
- Thou Shalt Remember that the Best Model for Meetings Is Democracy, Not Monarchy. If you call a meeting, the implication is that you want input. If you want input, give people a stake in the meeting; give them some power.
- Thou Shalt Always Prepare a Clear Agenda and Circulate It Beforehand.
- Thou Shalt Terminate a Regularly Scheduled Meeting When Its Purpose for Being No Longer Exists
Tip provided by Joel Levitt, CRL, CPMM, Prosci Certified Change Management Practitioner
Director of Projects for the Reliability Leadership Institute™ Reliabilityweb.com
Check out Joel's book "10 Minutes a Week to Great Meetings"
Why are meetings so important? For one, they are the lifeblood of institutional action. Without meetings and the communication and agreement they can engender, no (big) action can take place. With few exceptions, most people who run meetings have had no training, no study and no coaching to run meetings. Few people think about how that 20-minute discussion about fishing--however important that topic is--just cost your team four hours because 12 people in attendance all had their time wasted!
This book is specifically designed in three parts. The first part is 10 weekly or monthly lessons to run great meetings. These simple lessons can be covered in about 10 minutes each. Your team can dwell on each lesson for the whole week or month. Master it and move to the next lesson. The second part of the book is a detailed review of every area of meetings from agendas to assessments. Each chapter covers a topic area in depth. The final section is over 100 ideas to improve your meetings that are usable today!
10 Minutes a Week to Great Meetings will provide you with a great return on your time in the next, and every subsequent, meeting.