Master Your Game: Meeting Effectiveness
Master Your Game: Meeting Effectiveness
The Hidden Cost of Meetings
Each of us as team members can make a positive contribution to creating highly effective meetings. Each of us can play a role in setting the agenda, designing the meeting, facilitating the discussion, and providing feedback on the meeting's effectiveness. Meetings are a good indicator for determining the performance level of teams. In general, the more effective the meeting, the more high-performing the team.
Ineffective meetings represent a huge opportunity cost to organizations in terms of lost productivity by participants and foregone opportunities for the organization. Poor meetings lack synergistic and creative thought. Poor meetings also lack the final step: ACTION. If a decision is not inclusive, members lack the motivation to implement the solution. Consequently, the time and effort that went into the process represents a hidden cost to the organization.
How Effective Are Your Meetings?
Let's determine the effectiveness of your meetings. Please go through each item carefully and give yourself an honest score using this rating system of 1 to 5: 1 - Totally disagree,
2 - Disagree, 3 - Doesn't apply/not sure, 4 - Agree, 5 - Totally agree.
1. People tend to resist the idea of another meeting.
2. Meetings generally do not start or end on time.
3. When a member offers an idea, other members do not ask detailed questions or demonstrate active listening.
4. Discussions begin before it's clear to everyone exactly what is being discussed.
5. One or two members dominate the meeting.
6. The meeting often ends before everyone has been heard.
7. People do not address each other directly, but talk about others as if they were not in the room.
8. Many ideas have to be repeated several times before they get a response.
9. The formal leader or chair seems to have more weight than other members.
10. People start to disagree with others before they really understand what's being said.
11. Following meetings, there are postmortems behind closed doors about what really went on.
12. There is never any assessment at the end of meetings to see whether the group has achieved what it set out to do.
13. People react to new ideas by making fun, uttering put-downs, or ignoring the idea altogether rather than questioning and exploring it further.
14. Too many people sit in the meetings not really participating.
15. After the meeting, there is always some confusion about what was agreed upon and who is responsible for implementation.
16. Few decisions are made by consensus; the group lets individuals make decisions, or it tends to vote on issues without much preceding discussion/analysis.
17. The group often cannot make decisions because it does not have the necessary information, or people have not done their homework.
18. There is seldom any checking to see whether the group has gone off track, or if the meeting is an effective use of time.
19. Too often we agree on a course of action because everyone is tired, or cannot be bothered to delve deeper.
20. People seem to leave the meeting drained of energy.
21. The members seem to spend a disproportionate amount of time at the start of meetings trying to define the problem they're supposed to be working on.
22. During meetings people arrive late, ask to be excused early, are frequently called out, and so on.
*Adapted from Facilitating With Ease , Ingrid Bens, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA.
Next Steps
If you gave yourself a rating of mostly 1 and 2, congratulations to you and your team. You are on track. If you rated 4 or 5 on at least 10 questions, your group can benefit from a meeting effectiveness refresher.
In other issues, I will provide you with pointers on how to improve your meetings.
Wishing you engaging meetings,
Jacque
Master Your Game Meeting Effectiveness - To learn more about this author, visit Jacque Small's Website.
Like this article? Share it with your friends
Excellent meetings are productive, engaging, and synergistic; participants emerge from these sessions filled with great enthusiasm, energy, and a greater clarity of purpose. Effective meetings facilitate collective decisions that people will actively support by following through and taking action. Unfortunately, not all meetings are effective. Meetings can be energy-draining, time-wasting and costly.
The Hidden Cost of Meetings
Each of us as team members can make a positive contribution to creating highly effective meetings. Each of us can play a role in setting the agenda, designing the meeting, facilitating the discussion, and providing feedback on the meeting's effectiveness. Meetings are a good indicator for determining the performance level of teams. In general, the more effective the meeting, the more high-performing the team.
Ineffective meetings represent a huge opportunity cost to organizations in terms of lost productivity by participants and foregone opportunities for the organization. Poor meetings lack synergistic and creative thought. Poor meetings also lack the final step: ACTION. If a decision is not inclusive, members lack the motivation to implement the solution. Consequently, the time and effort that went into the process represents a hidden cost to the organization.
How Effective Are Your Meetings?
Let's determine the effectiveness of your meetings. Please go through each item carefully and give yourself an honest score using this rating system of 1 to 5: 1 - Totally disagree,
2 - Disagree, 3 - Doesn't apply/not sure, 4 - Agree, 5 - Totally agree.
1. People tend to resist the idea of another meeting.
2. Meetings generally do not start or end on time.
3. When a member offers an idea, other members do not ask detailed questions or demonstrate active listening.
4. Discussions begin before it's clear to everyone exactly what is being discussed.
5. One or two members dominate the meeting.
6. The meeting often ends before everyone has been heard.
7. People do not address each other directly, but talk about others as if they were not in the room.
8. Many ideas have to be repeated several times before they get a response.
9. The formal leader or chair seems to have more weight than other members.
10. People start to disagree with others before they really understand what's being said.
11. Following meetings, there are postmortems behind closed doors about what really went on.
12. There is never any assessment at the end of meetings to see whether the group has achieved what it set out to do.
13. People react to new ideas by making fun, uttering put-downs, or ignoring the idea altogether rather than questioning and exploring it further.
14. Too many people sit in the meetings not really participating.
15. After the meeting, there is always some confusion about what was agreed upon and who is responsible for implementation.
16. Few decisions are made by consensus; the group lets individuals make decisions, or it tends to vote on issues without much preceding discussion/analysis.
17. The group often cannot make decisions because it does not have the necessary information, or people have not done their homework.
18. There is seldom any checking to see whether the group has gone off track, or if the meeting is an effective use of time.
19. Too often we agree on a course of action because everyone is tired, or cannot be bothered to delve deeper.
20. People seem to leave the meeting drained of energy.
21. The members seem to spend a disproportionate amount of time at the start of meetings trying to define the problem they're supposed to be working on.
22. During meetings people arrive late, ask to be excused early, are frequently called out, and so on.
*Adapted from Facilitating With Ease , Ingrid Bens, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA.
Next Steps
If you gave yourself a rating of mostly 1 and 2, congratulations to you and your team. You are on track. If you rated 4 or 5 on at least 10 questions, your group can benefit from a meeting effectiveness refresher.
In other issues, I will provide you with pointers on how to improve your meetings.
Wishing you engaging meetings,
Jacque
Master Your Game Meeting Effectiveness - To learn more about this author, visit Jacque Small's Website.
Like this article? Share it with your friends
 | |
 |
No article feedback found. |
| |
Leave Your Feedback |
 | |
| |||
Dave KurlanDave Kurlan is the founder and CEO of Objective Management Group, Inc., the industry leader in sales assessments and sales force evaluations, and the CEO of David Kurlan & Associates, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in sales force development. Dave has been a top rated speaker at Inc. Magazine's Conference on Growing the Company, the Sales & Marketing Management Conference and the Gazelles Sales & Marketing Summit. He has been featured on radio and TV, including World Business Review with General Norman Schwarzkopf, in Inc. Magazine, Selling Power Magazine, Sales & Marketing Management Magazine and Incentive Magazine. He is the author of Mindless Selling and Baseline Selling – How to Become a Sales Superstar by Using What You Already Know about the Game of Baseball. He created and wrote STAR, a proprietary recruiting process for hiring great salespeople, and he writes Understanding the Sales Force, a popular business Blog and is a contributing author to The Death of 20th Century Selling and 101 Great Ways to Improve Your Life, Volume 2. - Visit Dave Kurlan's Website |
|||
John BrennanJohn Brennan Ed.D. Dr. Brennan is President of Interpersonal Development, LLC, a training and development firm. Interpersonal Development has provided sales training and coaching to more than 3,000 sales reps from over 100 companies. A native of Australia, Dr. Brennan received his doctorate from the University of Rochester. His dissertation researched the effectiveness of Behavioral Modeling Technology in training people in interpersonal skills. While he has spent most of his career designing or delivering training, he was also a Vice-President of Sales of a training and development franchise with operations in 25 markets. Dr. Brennan has designed and delivered sales training in North America, Asia, Europe, Australia and the Middle East. He has been a guest speaker at numerous national and regional professional conferences. When Microsoft wanted Best Practices articles on sales for their web site, they called Dr. Brennan. The results are at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/FX011387391033.aspx His firm’s clients have included Volvo, The Prudential, Merrill Lynch, Eastman Kodak, Gannett, Equifax Europe, the Economist Group and countless small businesses. - Visit John Brennan's Website |
|||
George LudwigGeorge Ludwig is a recognized authority on sales strategy and peak performance psychology. An international speaker, trainer, and corporate consultant, he helps clients like Johnson & Johnson, Abbott Laboratories, Northwestern Mutual, CIGNA, and numerous others improve sales force effectiveness and performance. Though it's George's strategies and processes that help corporations increase productivity and performance, it's his tremendous energy and dynamism that spark the transformation. Again and again, clients remark on his amazing ability to unleash human capacity and inspire men and women to break out of their comfort zones. The result is a whole new type of salesperson. His customized presentations teach achievers to make stunning advances in their lives. From helping salespeople realize cherished dreams to helping corporations exponentially accelerate revenue streams, George Ludwig leaves audiences and individuals empowered, emboldened, and clamoring for more. George is the best-selling author of Power Selling: Seven Strategies for Cracking the Sales Code and Wise Moves: 60 Quick Tips to Improve Your Position in Life & Business. - Visit George Ludwig's Website |
|||
David BarrDavid Barr is the President of Venture Opportunities, Inc. David has been a professional business broker/intermediary since 1980 focusing on General Business Brokerage and Mergers and Acquisitions representing client transaction value from $400,000 to $20,000,000. Mr. Barr has handled the sale of over four hundred and fifty companies. David earned a university degree from the State University of New York majoring in economics and business. David holds the Mergers and Acquisition Master Intermediary and the Certified Business Intermediary designations from the International Business Brokers Association. He is also a Senior Business Analyst and a Texas licensed Real Estate Agent. For more information about David and Venture Opportunities, visit www.bizdealmaker.com. - Visit David Barr's Website |
|||
|
To learn more about the Evan Elite Author Program please contact us. | |||
 | |
|  |
Subscribe to Jacque's articles
 | |
|
|  |
 | |
|
| |
 | |||||||
|
 | ||
 |
||
 |
||
|
||
|
| ||
 |
| Have you written articles that would be of value to entrepreneurs? Become an expert on our site by publishing them! Expose yourself to a wide audience, drive more traffic to your website and get more sales! Click Here for details. |
|
|
 |
| Modeling the Masters: Learn the true secrets behind Walt Disney's business success factors & grow your company! Video produced by Phanta Media |
|
|
 |
"Learn straight from Evan how you can Make a Full Time Income (And More) from a Website"
Click Here To Learn More |
|
|
|
|
Get advice & tips from famous business owners, new articles by entrepreneur experts, my latest website updates, & special sneak peaks at what's to come!
|
|
|
 Addictive Entrepreneurship Put Yourself Into the Top 3% Webinar Plan The Art Of Networking Make It Happen |
|
 | ||
 |
Top 50 SEO Posts - 2008
Top SEO Posts of the Year | |
 |
Top 50 Marketing Blogs
Top Marketing Blogs of 2010 | |
| ||
 | ||||
| ||||
|
| ||||
| ||||
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||
|
Email us your ideas on how to make our website more valuable! Thank you Sharon from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for your suggestions to make the newsletter look like the website and profile younger entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez and Sean Combs!
|
|
|
