5 Tips for Running Effective Meetings: Improve Meeting Management Skills

Meetings are an essential part of the life of every organization and your ability to run effective meetings with your management skills is a critical part of your success in meeting management. As a leader, there are a series of things I recommend that you keep in the back of your mind.

Meeting Management Tip #1: Begin With a Purpose

 

One of the most important tasks you need to do to improve your management skills and hold more effective meetings, is to begin with an outline of the purpose.  When everyone sits down you say, “We are holding this meeting today to accomplish these goals and objectives.”

The opening five to seven minutes in any meeting is the most important component to conducting more effective meetings.  It sets the foundation, establishes the parameters, organizes the terms of reference and tells everybody in the room why they are there, for how long, and what they need to accomplish.  I also recommend that you write out your introduction word for word and read it out.  This clarity will allow a person who doesn’t know you or the situation coming in to get right up to speed at the start.

Improve your management skills during a meeting by being both specific and punctual with the timing.  Be sure to announce the duration.  This should also be printed at the top of your agenda, but you want to restate it in your introduction.  Begin right on time. Do not penalize the people who were there on time by waiting for others who are late. Assume that the latecomer is not coming at all and get right on with the meeting.  This helped me so much when I first learned this.

If someone comes in late and finds out they’ve missed important information, refuse to start over for them.  They will eventually get the message, be more punctual, and help you improve your management skills in a respectable manner.  Many companies have a policy where if a meeting is called for 10:00 am, they lock the doors from the inside at 10:01. You only have to do that once to get people to be on time.

If you’re there to solve a problem you say, “We are here to talk about and to come to a decision, conclusion, and resolution on this problem.  Here are the facts of the problem.  Here is the information that we have, the alternatives we’ve considered, and our market intelligence.  Now, what do we do from here?”

Meeting Management Tip #2: Encourage Open Discussion for More Effective Meetings

 

It’s very important that you get input from everybody; not only the people who have a lot to contribute and are eager, but also from those who are more shy and less likely to speak up.  You want input from especially women and others who may be a little bit reluctant to try to compete with more aggressive or assertive people.

Remember that leaders don’t dominate. We have found that the natural tendency of meeting leaders is to speak 50 percent of the time on average. This is not for you and it is important for you to steer away from this to improve your management skills. As a leader, you should take the role as a facilitator and avoid hogging the discussion. There is a tendency for you to speak more and more because you’re the one who prepared the agenda.

The way to avoid inadvertently dominating the meeting is to delegate meeting leadership. Whenever possible, assign the meeting management responsibility to someone else, to build subordinates skills. This is wonderful training tool that gives employees the opportunity to build their meeting management skills, organize their thought, and perform in front of a group. They will learn a lot from planning the meeting and preparing the agenda, and this will ultimately help you run more effective meetings.  Very often what I’ll do in my management positions is rotate the leader position to other staff in subsequent meetings, which will help them improve their management skills.

Keep the discussion on track.  A key job of the meeting leader is to keep bringing people back to the issue. Stick to the items on the agenda and don’t allow discussion to stray or wander. By keeping the discussion back to the main issue, this will help you conduct more effective meetings and save a lot of time.

Meeting Management Tip #3: Press for Closure

Once you start talking on a subject, discuss it thoroughly but press for closure on what has been decided and who’s going to do what and by when, before you go on to the next item on the agenda.

The inability to keep on track and to press for closure are the two major time wasters and major complaints from people who attend non-effective meetings.

Meeting Management Tip #4: Summarize the Main Point

An important meeting management tip to learn is to summarize at the end of each discussion point and at the end of the meeting.  Set out and summarize your time and action schedules, and your implementation plan and assignments.  Then have everybody in the meeting agree on what has been decided.

Something very interesting happens.  There is what is called “peer pressure.”  People who agree to do something in front of their peers are much more likely to follow through.  If everyone heard them say that they would do something by Thursday at noon, it is much more likely that they will have an internal incentive that will save you the need to monitor, inspect and control.

They can’t come back later and say they didn’t know what they were supposed to do, because there is a group of witnesses.  So getting people to commit publicly is a very powerful tool of meeting management psychologically and one of the best management skills I’ve learned to use.

Meeting Management Tip #5: Keep a Record

Finally, distribute minutes from the meeting within 24 hours. The more important the decisions that have been taken, the more important that you have them distributed in writing so that if they have questions they can get back to you. If there are no questions then they are accepting the record of the meeting as distributed. This is a final step that is very important part of conducting more effective meetings and improving your management skills.

"Study the public behavior of top stars and you can detect a keen attentiveness to brand value."

-- Peter Bart, American Journalist

Accepting Yourself Unconditionally

Did you know that self-acceptance begins in infancy, with the influence of your parents and siblings and other important people?

Your own level of self-acceptance is determined largely by how well you feel you are accepted by the important people in your life.

Your attitude toward yourself is determined largely by the attitudes that you think other people have toward you. When you believe that other people think highly of you, your level of self-acceptance and self-esteem goes straight up.

The best way to build a healthy personality involves understanding yourself and your feelings.

Let the Light Shine In

This is achieved through the simple exercise of self-disclosure. For you to truly understand yourself, or to stop being troubled by things that may have happened in your past, you must be able to disclose yourself to at least one person. You have to be able to get those things off your chest. You must rid yourself of those thoughts and feelings by revealing them to someone who won’t make you feel guilty or ashamed for what has happened.

Understand What Makes You Tick

The second part of personality development follows from self-disclosure, and it’s called self-awareness. Only when you can disclose what you’re truly thinking and feeling to someone else can you become aware of those thoughts and emotions If the other person simply listens to you without commenting or criticizing, you have the opportunity to become more aware of the person you are and why you do the things you do. You begin to develop perspective, or what the Buddhists call “detachment.”

Be Honest With Yourself

Now we come to the good part. After you’ve gone through self-disclosure to self-awareness, you arrive at self-acceptance. You accept yourself for the person you are, with good points and bad points, with strengths and weaknesses, and with the normal frailties of a human being. When you develop the ability to stand back and look at yourself honestly, and to candidly admit to others that you may not be perfect but you’re all you’ve got, you start to enjoy a heightened sense of self-acceptance.

Do An Inventory of Your Accomplishments

A valuable exercise for developing higher levels of self-acceptance involves doing an inventory of yourself. In doing this inventory, your job is to accentuate the positive and minimize the negative.

Think of your unique talents and abilities. Think of your core skills, the things that you do exceptionally well that account for your success in your profession and in your personal life right now.

Think About Your Future

Think about your future possibilities and the fact that your potential is virtually unlimited. You can do what you want to do and go where you want to go. You can be the person you want to be. You can set large and small goals and make plans and move step-by-step, progressively toward their realization. There are no obstacles to what you can accomplish except the obstacles that you create in your mind.

Action Exercises

Here are three steps you can take immediately to put these ideas into action:

First, sit down with your spouse, or a good friend, and tell him or her about something that is troubling you and is still causing you unhappiness.

Second, develop perspective on your problem by standing back from it and imagining that it was happening to someone else. What advice would you give to that person?

Third, think continually about the good experiences and accomplishments you have enjoyed in the past. Remind yourself regularly that you are a pretty good person and you’ve done a lot of good things in your life.

Create Your Sales Plan
By: Joey Cheema

Nothing happens until a sale takes place. Your actual ability to sell your product or service to your customer determines your profit or loss, success or failure, in business. The sales process, to be effective, must be planned and organized in detail from start to finish. Every word and action must be scripted, rehearsed and memorized. Nothing can be left to chance.

Sales Recipe
Making a sale is like cooking with a recipe. You must use the correct ingredient and blend them in the proper quantity with the right timing. All successful companies have developed a proven sales process that can be duplicated over and over. By using a proven sales system, you can accurately predict the quantity of your sales, the average size of your sales, and the profitability of your sales activities.

Prospecting
It is important to speak directly or by telephone to people who can and will buy and pay in a reasonable period of time. Start with your ideal customer profile. Who is he or she exactly-in terms of age, occupation, income, education? Who is he or she exactly—in terms of problems, wants, needs, attitudes, and experiences regarding your product or service? If you could advertise for perfect customers, how would you describe him or her?

Marketing and advertising is aimed at telling your ideal prospect that your product will help them. The ideal prospect has an immediate need for what you sell. The ideal prospect knows you, likes you, and respects your products or business. The ideal prospect can buy and pay for your product if he or she likes it.

Establish Rapport
Establishing rapport and trust with the customer is a must. The prospect will not listen to you or buy from you unless he/she likes you and believes that you are honest. Be friendly, straightforward and believable. Be punctual, prepared and properly dressed. Ask questions and listen carefully to the answers. Make no attempt to sell until the prospect is relaxed and comfortable with you. Identify what the customer needs so you can better sell to them. Ask carefully planned, structured questions so that you can fully understand the customer's situation.

There is a direct relationship between asking questions and sales success. Plan your questions word-for-word in advance. Make no effort to sell or talk about your product. Seek first to understand, then to be understood.

Presenting Your Product or Service
Repeat back the specific needs or concerns that your prospect has expressed. Position yourself as a trusted advisor, dedicated to helping him solve his problem or achieve his goal with your product. Position yourself as a teacher-showing her how your product works to help her satisfy her/his needs. Match the customers expressed needs and concerns to the product or service. Focus on helping rather than selling. Conclude your presentation with an explanation of how the product is delivered or used. Invite questions.

Action Exercises
List three phrases or questions you can use or ask to determine if this is a qualified prospect.

"Do not fear going forward slowly; fear only to stand still."

-- Chinese Proverb

Review of the book The One Minute Manager,

provided by Joey Cheema                        HLS International

The One Minute Manager by Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson

Summary

The One Minute Manager reveals three secrets to productive and efficient managing as told through a young man's search for the perfect managing and leading skills. The One Minute Manager is focused on, not surprisingly, a one minute manager. The man is a venerable leader that is highly spoken of by his employees, his three secrets being the key to his success.

The first secret is One Minute Goals. This involves a meeting of the manager and the employee where goals are agreed on, written down in a brief statement, and occasionally reviewed to ensure that productivity is occurring. This whole process takes a "minute", which truly means it is a quick meeting, however it is not limited to just sixty seconds. The purpose of one minute goal setting is to confirm that responsibilities of each working is understood, understanding that confusion leads to inefficiency and discouragement.

The second secret to one minute managing is one minute praisings. This involves being open with people about their performance. When you catch someone doing something right, a goal of the one minute manager, you praise them immediately, telling them specifically what they did correctly. Pause to allow them to "feel" how good you feel regarding their importance to the organization, and finish by shaking hands.

The third secret is the one minute reprimand. Being honest with those around you involves reprimanding when a wrong has occurred. The first step is to reprimand immediately and specifically. This is the same as the second secret, and it holds an important aspect of the first secret: it enables an understanding of responsibilities and how to complete them correctly. Following the reprimand, shake hands and remind the person that he or she is important and it was simply their performance that you did not like. The one minute reprimand consists of the reprimand and the reassurance, both being equally important. If you leave the latter out, you will not be liked by those around you and they will attribute mistakes to them being worth less, which is far from the truth.

Recommendation

The One Minute Manager is a quick read that emphasizes key points throughout. The message is clear, and implementing the ideas is straight-forward and laid out in the book. This makes it simple to utilize the knowledge and techniques that the one minute manager style offers.

Thank you very much for your time.