Managing Leadership^®

You’ve held the best meeting anyone’s ever attended. It closed to actual applause, and everyone came up afterward to congratulate you. Clearly, a job well done, right?

Not yet. As all those attendees go back to their units, they will exchange notes, and begin to identify small discrepancies in their accounts of what transpired. When they discuss the meeting with their peers back in their work-groups, new interpretations will begin to insinuate themselves, unconsciously or otherwise, into those accounts. As their distance from the meeting site and the other participants increases, so will the gaps between their assessments of what it meant. Eventually, its force will have dissipated into mere confused inaction - or, worse, determined but erroneous action.

This happens all-too-often, including after the apparently best meetings, like yours. It means that the fruit of your labors wound up in arid, untended soil. And that points to why your labors never really end.

It is important to remember that the meeting itself is arguably among the least important elements of the meeting process. It’s value isn’t in its results, but in their expression throughout the organization. To help ensure that your meeting is an enduring success in this sense, you have at least two more things to do:

Memorandum of Results.

This may seem like a real groaner, but it’s essential - and you’ll be surprised by how much it’s appreciated. All participants get the MoR. In it, you record the results and any consequent taskings or follow-on steps to be taken.

You are specific, here, including agreed-upon personnel or unit assignments and deadlines. You also include any unresolved items and the steps determined to resolve them. You may include supplementary and supporting information, such as attendees and discussion points.

Your real purpose, however, is not to write a history, but to keep the propulsive force in motion behind the action generated by the meeting. You will find that the MoR is viewed as a mark of professionalism that the participants will tend to adopt, themselves, with respect to the overarching issues the meeting addressed. It also helps to fix a unified interpretation of meeting results, serving as a source document regarding them, and helping to restrain the natural tendency for impressions to deviate.

Build the results into the organization’s agenda.

It’s not enough to send out the MoR - you have to take the next step, and ensure that participants and their units do, as well; close the loop and make sure the taskings find their way into organizational activity. Establish and promulgate mechanisms for participants to act on, report, and integrate their taskings at the related deadlines. In other words, transform the meeting results into organizational action which you continue to manage.

Seen in the way we have addressed them over the past several days, meetings aren’t something you throw together to address whatever issue appears over the transom. They are a considered step in a process that is an essential part of your operations. It is an approach that should help you hold fewer meetings that have a greater positive impact on both organizational productivity and morale.

And we’ll be checking on that. But in the meanwhile, this meeting seems to have been going on forever; it’s time to move on to something new. See you 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 tip: We’ve spent some time discussing how to run a meeting, but you should definitely stop over to see what Michael Wade, author of Execupundit.com, says are your responsibilities while attending one (or any presentation).

One more thing: yesterday, I inadvertantly inserted an incorrect link to Jamie Notter’s excellent post about complexity and the decision-making process. My apologies for any inconvenience! The link has been fixed there, but here it is again - it’s well worth your time, so do take a moment to view it!

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You really should try out this great feature on the site: If you double-click on any (non-hypertext-linked) word on the main page, a window provided by Answers.com will open providing definitions or encyclopedic material about that term, together with links to additional sources of information. Try it out - it’s interesting and fun.

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Similar Posts:

• Can we fit this in somewhere?
• Managing your meeting
• Making your meeting
• Recovering from bad management
• Meetings - what are they all about?

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