Managing Leadership^®

If meetings are so vital to planning and coordinating our efforts at work, why do we dread them so much? We’ve discussed some of the reasons for this over the past several days.

But there’s another, even more common problem with meetings: they, simply, aren’t well done. They too often are:

• poorly conceived

• poorly planned

• poorly executed

• poorly followed-up

This is a huge, and hugely important, topic, and we can’t cover it in detail in these pages. But we will go over some of the principles for overcoming the above points over the next several days. In the meanwhile, there are at least two ways you can protect yourself from meeting-overload.

One was referred to in the Jared Sandberg column in the WSJ referenced in the post that started this series. He describes a manager who writes down the meetings he has decided to attend in his paper agenda. If he hasn’t written it there, it doesn’t exist for him. It doesn’t matter how many meetings he’s been pencilled in for on the corporate intranet scheduling system, or how many phone or email invites he’s received; he only attends those that have made it into his own personal daily planner.

But how do you decide which those will be? Here’s a devastatingly simple screening tool offered by Joe Raasch in a comment to last Thursday’s post:

One tactic I employed with great success on needless meetings: If anyone requests you to be in a meeting and doesn’t give you an agenda, decline the meeting.”

That’s not too much to ask, is it? The odds aren’t bad that if you require meeting planners to provide substantially detailed agendas, they will either reconsider the need for the meeting in the first place, or do a better job with it than otherwise.

When presented with an invite and an agenda, then, you at least have some positive indications regarding those matters. In particular, you also have sufficient information to determine if the meeting is about something you should witness or contribute to.

Many of us are aware that we should have an agenda for our meetings, of course. But when we announce the meeting, we usually just add a general description of the topic, rather than also transmitting at least a tentative agenda to our prospective attendees. Providing that, though, not only helps them to make their participation decision, but also to come ready and able to contribute productively.

But you don’t just start building an agenda on your initial instinct for the meeting; you have to go deeper than that. We’ll take a look at that, tomorrow.

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Be sure not to miss any of the posts in this series!

1. Collaboration jams
2. The swaying sword of Damocles
3. Smoke-filled rooms
4. Meetings - what are they all about?
5. How about we get together sometime?
6. Can we fit this in somewhere?
7. Making your meeting
8. Managing your meeting
9. Are you sure we were at the same meeting?

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Today’s tips: The WSJ has some coverage today of women managers’ continuing advance into the tiers of upper management. The lead item, by Carol Hymnowitz, provides an overview of the related statistics that is well worth careful considering. Better yet, though, is her In the Lead column, also in today’s edition, describing how women are beginning to use networks to strengthen their presence and productivity in the ranks of senior management. This has been the main missing key, and it is a welcome development which should receive continuing attention, and certainly yours: please take a moment to view the article.

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Technorati Tags: meeting, planning, coordinating, work, Jared Sandberg, WSJ, manager, agenda, daily planner, Joe Raasch, women manager, management, Carol Hymnowitz, In the Lead, women, network, productivity, senior management