Guest Post: Ying Liu

Ying is one of Chris' Summer 2010 Professional Speaking students. Here she writes about real-world meetings.

Are you going to hold a meeting? Wait until you have answered these questions. Do you know the purpose of this meeting? Do you have an agenda? Do you know your role? If you have all these answers and well prepared, go ahead. But if you do not, I strongly suggest that you should consider these questions thoroughly before a meeting. Why? Take a look at interesting the statistics below, and then you will find the answer.

Approximately 11 million meetings occur in the U.S. every day. 91 percent people admit to daydreaming on a regular basis meetings, 96 percent miss meetings or parts of meetings, 73 percent say they have brought other work to meetings, and 39 percent say they have dozed during meetings. These figures are surprising and terrible. It comes along with low efficiency and few results. The need to improve our meetings is evident. So how can we run a meeting effectively and efficiently? The following points are critical.

The first step is to know the purpose of the meeting. Get to the heart of the matter in a simple and logical way. And differentiate the short term and long term objectives. Tell people directly what the current situation is and what is expected to be fixed. Then set an agenda to prevent the meeting from drifting off-topic or interminably dragging on. Begin with what was accomplished since the last meeting. Don’t waste other people’s time.

The second important thing is to know your audience. In order to achieve the purpose, you need to understand your audience first. As Professor Labash mentioned, the people invited should add value and expertise and provide new perspectives to existing issues. Then you can take corresponding strategies to convince them or get help. In addition, make sure key people will be in attendance.

Third, make sure to result in action. The best result of a meeting is to develop ideas, to motivate people, and to move people and ideas to positive actions. A meeting without action or improvement is not a meeting, but a conversation. Thus, try to figure out a concrete solution, follow up, and get things fixed.

Real-world meetings need to be managed so as to avoid being ineffective. As we discuss above, study the objectives, set the agenda, and meet the needs of audience when preparing. And then start on time, end on time, and get things done in the real-world meetings.