Guest Post - Sowmya Saragadam

Sowmya is one of Chris' Spring 2012 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. Here she writes about meetings.

Someone said “Many heads are better than one!”.  When people meet and come up with solutions to a problem on hand, you see the wide variety of directions the discussion goes into. This in turn helps people to come out with better solutions as well. It doesn’t mean that one should have meetings for every trivial issue that could otherwise be solved through less time-taking means, say through a phone call or an email.

Now if we have to start talking about meetings, the first and foremost thing I would like to tell is “never be late to a meeting”.  One should realize that going late to a meeting is as bad as going late to an examination. Rather worse! In an examination, it’s just you who is responsible for your own self, whereas if you go late to a meeting you might waste someone else’s time in updating you about what has happened so far. Punctuality reflects your sincerity and commitment towards your job.

Make sure everyone introduces himself or herself, especially if they are all meeting for the first time. It is always nicer having some optimistic and energetic people in a meeting who can help brighten the spirits of others while contributing to the discussion, instead of having someone who would create an unpleasant atmosphere. It is ideal to have less than ten members in a meeting in order to make sure time is spent effectively communicating with each other about the topic at hand than in managing themselves. Before one comes to a meeting, he/she should have an idea about what the meeting is about. That shall give a heads up to the person to get well versed with the related issues before hand in order to be able to contribute better. That would also make the person feel more involved and responsible for the meeting.

The meeting place should be easily accessible to everyone. I would say one should carry some cash, for parking, if one is going to a meeting in a new area. The best time for a meeting would differ depending on who all are involved in the meeting. Say, if you were an employee of a 9am-5pm firm, you would not be very enthusiastic about attending a meeting at 4:30pm! Also, towards the end of the week, say a Friday evening would be a time to hit a bar and not go to a serious meeting.

The agenda for the meeting should highlight critical issues as well as the critical success factors. Keep the issue in front of you and ask yourself, or others, “why” five times, and that would help you understand the critical issues easily. Don’t scare away people with a 10 page agenda, instead try to keep it small, say limit it to a page. If you have too many issues to be discussed, you can sort the issues into different buckets and have more than one meeting, in order to solve them. It would also be helpful and more organized if you can be precise; i.e. decide on what is going to be discussed by whom and in how much time. You should always make sure that there are conversations and suggestions flowing in the meeting room and not arguments and demands. You should come out of the meeting room with an agreement in hand. If not an agreement, at least have all the opinions of the members jotted down, in order to come up with a solution considering all the positives and negatives of the feedbacks. Also, before wrapping up a meeting, you should make it clear to everyone about what has been concluded on, as well as decide on a timing and a place for the next meeting, if necessary.