Productive Meetings Have A Productive Purpose

Productive meetings have a productive purpose This is not your ordinary career site. I help the corporate worker who toils away in the company cubicle make career transitions. You want to do your job well, following all the rules -- . The career transitions where I can help you center on three critical career areas: How to land a job, succeed in a job, and build employment security. Top 10 Posts on Categories Business meeting effectiveness often comes down to one piece of advice: have an agenda for the meeting. That’s okay, but it misses the bigger point: What kind of meeting are you creating the agenda for? There isn’t one kind of meeting. There are several. How effective your meeting is first requires you to define the type of meeting you will be hosting. Then creating an agenda that makes sense for that type of meeting. In the big picture, you need to get to accomplishment for every meeting you host. That accomplishment is dependent on the meeting type. If you don’t define the type of meeting you are hosting, everyone walks into your meeting with a different set of expectations, preparedness and focus. Better to define the meeting type to help everyone get on the same page. Or agenda. In this series on , I’m going to take a look at the different types of meetings we have and how each should work to get to an accomplishment for the meeting. Let’s define the meeting types. The decision meeting â€" let’s face it â€" is rare. Or, getting to a decision in a meeting is rare. Much of the reason for the rarity is that we don’t define the meeting as a decision meeting nor do the right work ahead of the meeting to make sure a decision can be made during it. A decision meeting is where you are looking for a specific direction on a topic or approval for something. The decision can be as straightforward as agreement to move on to the next phase of a project or higher level to get approval for a strategy to take as a department. Status meetings are just that: give status of your work. There are lots of problems with status â€" they tend to go off into everything except status of the work in progress. I’ll take a look at what the pitfalls are of the status meeting and how to handle them. The workshop meeting is a meeting where a group of people come to work on a specific set of tasks. Whether it is information to fill out, rehearsing how a cut over will go, or building a solution to a problem, workshop meetings offer a great productivity opportunity. Or a total time waste. You’ve seen these: some bad event happens and everyone gets in a room and…flails about trying to make a bad situation right. Panic meetings really show your organizational maturity. And maybe yours, too. The brainstorming meeting is really a specific type of meeting. Unfortunately, almost any meeting can break down into a brainstorming sessions instead of the original purpose of the meeting. How many times have you been in a Decision meeting only to have it end up being a brainstorming session? Yup. Me too. You know this one: everyone meets to work on a project for the first time. Or a new leader (maybe you!) comes in to a failing project and the first meeting is the fiasco of everyone trying to figure out what is wrong, what to do, with no ideas on anything. Yeah. That one. There really is a good way to handle this kind of meeting. It’s just rare that anyone uses it. In the comments, let me know of there are other meeting types you’d think apply. I’ll take a look at those, too. […] or a team roundtable that describes where people are in meeting their goals. This meeting, as all different types of meetings in this series, have specific actions to take as a leader and participant in a […] Reply This is not your ordinary career site. I help the corporate worker who toils away in the company cubicle make career transitions. You want to do your job well, following all the rules â€" . The career transitions where I can help you center on three critical career areas: How to land a job, succeed in a job, and build employment security. policies The content on this website is my opinion and will probably not reflect the views of my various employers. Apple, the Apple logo, iPad, Apple Watch and iPhone are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. I’m a big fan.