What makes for a great meeting? As a leader, how can you keep discussions on point and productive? In How to Run a Meeting, Antony Jay argues that too many leaders fail to plan adequately for meetings. In this bestselling article, he defines the characteristics that contribute to success, from keeping formal minutes to acknowledging junior staff first. These guidelines will help you get demonstrably better results from every meeting you run. Since 1922, Harvard Business Review has been a leading source of breakthrough ideas in management practice. The Harvard Business Review Classics series now offers you the opportunity to make these seminal pieces a part of your permanent management library. Each highly readable volume contains a groundbreaking idea that continues to shape best practices and inspire countless managers around the world.
Meetings are important business and social activities. However, research suggests that meetings engulf as much as 60 per cent of the time we spend at work. Despite their necessity and the costs involved, many meetings are organized by individuals who have other full-time responsibilities and lack the formal training and experience to ensure their successful planning and execution. How to Manage Meetings provides much-needed guidance on how to get meetings right. Readers should be able to reap the rewards from appropriate preparation, maximizing participation, understanding group dynamics, effective chairing, and how to follow up effectively after a meeting has taken place. This fully revised second edition includes new content on electronic and virtual meetings, a new chapter on improving a group's thinking and additional guidance on how best to prepare for a meeting from the perspective of three key roles: Chair, Administrator and Participant.
It seems these days that everyone hates meetings. How many times have you heard someone say, "We have too many meetings," or "I am booked so solid every day in meetings I never have time to get anything done," or "I'm back-to-back..." But when you talk to people, it isn't that they hate meetings; it's that they don't like meetings in which nothing gets done. No one is sure why the meeting was called, or why half the people are in the room, or what exactly is supposed to get done, or what was decided. We complain about meetings, but we seem to attend more and more of them. This book is for people who need to lead effective meetings, in any context. It is a blueprint for how to have your meetings work, defined as, meetings that achieve the results you want to achieve, in the meeting and afterwards. It's a how-to guide for using the time you spend planning, organizing and conducting meetings wisely. It's about getting results through meetings. Why are effective meetings important? Meeting quality matters. Well-run organizations have well-run meetings. Sloppily run organizations have sloppily run meetings. What are the signs of a bad meeting? The meeting starts late. There is no agenda. The meeting runs over. No one is sure what if anything was decided or accomplished. The same meeting to discuss the same topic seems to be held over and over again. No one knows what the next steps are or who is supposed to follow up whom for what. Someone monopolizes the meeting and someone else talks in circles, while yet someone else seems to simply rephrase and repeat what has already been said. Nothing discourages people, whether volunteers or employees, like feeling they are wasting their time. Too many meetings waste time. They sap morale, and leave people frustrated or irritated. This is a shame, as leading an effective meeting is not rocket science once you have a blueprint. If you have an allergic reaction to wasting time in meetings, this book is for you. It is divided into five principal sections: - Preparation - Invitation - Agenda - Delivery - Follow Up The sections outline the five phases of a meeting. For your meeting to be successful (again, defined as, a meeting that achieves the results you want to achieve), you must execute each phase successfully. Meetings versus Presentations The tips in this book are intended to apply to both meetings, in which various people interact in a more-or-less informal setting, and presentations, occasions on which a speaker presents material to an audience in a structured, more-or-less formal setting. Some principles apply more directly to meetings, others to presentations. All are relevant to both.
A best-seller in its first edition, Making Meetings Work: Achieving High Quality Group Decisions, Second Edition covers everything you need to know about organizing engaging meetings, including preparing agendas, controlling what happens behind the scenes prior to and after meetings, and managing conflicting values and personalities. Through the Meeting Masters Research Project at the University of Michigan, author John E. Tropman observed and interviewed the nation′s most successful meeting experts to find out how to make meetings both stimulating and productive. Based on his findings, Tropman formulated seven principles and fourteen commandments for implementing dynamic meetings. This second edition has been extensively revised and expanded to include Family meetings and family group decision making Problems and solutions for board of directors meetings Community and civic meetings Volunteers and meetings Leadership in community decision making Making Meetings Work: Achieving High Quality Group Decisions, Second Edition provides simple, easily applied best practices for supervising or instigating meetings with decision accomplishment outcomes. Author John E. Tropman reveals goal oriented procedures that keep proposals moving towards quality group decision making and assure other participants look forward to attending your meetings. Written with humor and a deep understanding of the realities of business and political life, Making Meetings Work: Achieving High Quality Group Decisions, Second Edition is an extraordinary resource for anyone who leads, facilitates, or attends meetings.
This book shows that the value of group decision making lies in its ability to bring together people with a variety of different expertise and experiences. These techniques are applied to problems such as health care, homlessness and family violence.
Groups and teams are the backbone of most organizations. Employees come together to pool their efforts, join forces, develop creative ideas, and make decisions in one key social context: the workplace meeting. This volume presents novel perspectives and state-of-the art research insights into the management of team meetings in the workplace.
Have you just been asked to chair a meeting, or take the minutes, or set up a meeting agenda? Need some help? Would samples of an agenda or minutes be useful? What about some techniques for chairing a meeting or dealing with difficult people? Then this "How to ." book is for you. In it you will find: how to decide whether there should be meeting how to set up the agenda the importance of setting timeframes in the agenda-and sticking to them how to make sure that time is not wasted and the important items are covered how to chair the meeting how to stop time wasters and to make sure you spend the right time on the right topics how the minute taker can collect the right information during the meeting how to write the minutes how to get the best out of the participants how to deal with difficult people There are also: a checklist for the meeting chair agenda example and agenda template minutes example and minutes template a checklist for how to improve your meetings a checklist for getting the best out of people a checklist for the minute taker a checklist for dealing with disagreements, differences and conflict
This book is packed with strategies that school and district leaders at all levels can use to run effective staff meetings, inclusion teaching teams, and committees or task forces.
Run more productive meetings. Whether you're new to running meetings or a seasoned executive with no time to waste, leading effective (and even pleasant!) meetings is a must. Running Meetings guides you through the basics of: Crafting a useful agenda Inviting the right team members Making sure everyone's voice is heard while avoiding conflict Capturing decisions, ideas, and follow-up tasks Don't have much time? Get up to speed fast on the most essential business skills with HBR's 20-Minute Manager series. Whether you need a crash course or a brief refresher, each book in the series is a concise, practical primer that will help you brush up on a key management topic. Advice you can quickly read and apply, for ambitious professionals and aspiring executives—from the most trusted source in business.
