I am sure there are lots of books written about how to lead a meeting and many of us can provide tips for others, but there is a particular hint I would like to share today.
The deal is this. If there is x amount of time for the meeting and y things to be covered, then we should keep our eye on the clock and every x/y minutes move the meeting to the next topic.
For example, today 9 different committees met on campus from 10 to noon. I ran one of the meetings and when we got started, I wrote on the white board that the first topic would be limited in time from 10:00 to 10:30, the second from 10:30 to 11:00, etc. Our group got really involved in the first discussion and we easily could have spent the whole time on it, however, we moved on to our other goals and finished a little ahead of time. Later in the day, a person from another committee was bemoaning the fact that they had 6 topics and did not even complete the first.
I am not trying to toot my own horn here. The reason I bring this up is that too often, way too often, the meetings I attend do not get moved along and the work does not get done efficiently and more and more meetings are planned.
I think you get the point.
Canada was awesome. We snowshoed 5 miles per day in rugged wilderness. The sauna each night felt great.
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1 comment:
I agree, Ron. I find that there are people who run meetings who are not able to tell someone who's talking and talking that we need to move on, and there are the people who can do that. From what I observe it seems like the people who have advanced farther are the ones who can get through the agenda of a meeting before time is up. Being new it is sometimes intimidating to tell someone who's been here 20+ years that he/she needs to wrap things up so we can move on.
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