"Dramatically Better Meetings"

Premises:

Meetings are an essential part of your day-to-day operations and an expression of your organization's culture. Not only are bad meetings a waste of time and money, they can send messages to your people that can ultimately undercut performance, undermine loyalty, and lower morale. Bad meetings are a real problem.

A workshop to improve meetings will not succeed if it merely provides the principles upon which good meetings are based. To learn, your people have to be entertained, engaged, and genuinely convinced that the tools they have been handed will make a difference. A workshop in which people perform, laugh, think critically and draw their own conclusions will produce more learning than any other kind.

As organizations look to operate more cost effectively, workshops and seminars may be viewed as luxury items that can easily and painlessly be deleted from the budget. The exact opposite is true in this case: bad meetings are costing you hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars every week. Investing in a two-hour workshop to improve these meetings and heighten overall organizational effectiveness is, in a real sense, a long-term cost-cutting move.

Workshop Outline:
Dramatically Better Meetings is a 2-hour workshop designed for groups of 20 to 150 people.

Each session begins with a one-act play entitled, "The Worst Meeting Ever." Six volunteers are selected from the audience to perform the play, enacting what is truly the most god-awful meeting anyone has ever attended. As the play unfolds, the remainder of the audience is assigned the task of identifying the 17 things that go wrong during the course of the mock meeting. (Number 17, incidentally, is homicide, which generally doesn't occur in most meetings but provides a nice dramatic conclusion to this one.)

Having identified distinct areas in which meetings fail, we then divide these into six categories and look more closely at:

Agendas
Why is a written agenda the single most important predictor of a successful meeting?

Effective Meeting Leadership
What do effective leaders know about drawing everyone into a discussion, subtly controlling its flow, and guiding groups to consensus?

Better Decision-Making Processes
Meeting experts at Intel have identified four different kinds of decision-making processes. Which do you use, and how do you find the right kind of process for each decision your group faces?

Managing Conflict within Meetings
Most meetings wouldn't be meetings without conflict, whether it's white-noise bickering in the background or full-on screaming that stops everything. How do you manage inevitable conflicts and move polarized parties to consensus?

How to be a More Effective Participant
The responsibility for effective meetings does not lie only with the leader; all participants can do their part to ensure the most productive use of time - if they know what's expected of them.

The Little Things that Can Make a Big Difference
Where a meeting is held, how minutes are kept, how long the meeting runs - these are little things that won't guarantee a good meeting, but not attending to each can almost always guarantee a bad one.

The workshop concludes with the companion piece to "The Worst Meeting Ever" - another one-act play entitled, "The Meeting Across the Street." In this five-minute performance, a second group of volunteers puts the principles of good meetings in play to such a flawless extent that the results are comical, but also serve to summarize the main points covered by the workshop.

All meeting participants are provided with written materials and a PowerPoint presentation that summarize the major principles of the workshop.

 

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