Got a Meeting? Get an Agenda

Ann All spoke with Dr. Taggart Smith, a professor in the Department of Organizational Leadership and Supervision at Purdue University's College of Technology. Among the subjects she teaches are meeting management, critical thinking, and interpersonal and group skills for leaders.

All: How can managers improve the odds that a meeting will be productive?
Smith: One of the things that concerns lots of us is having meetings when you really don't need to have them. Just because it's Monday and you usually have meetings on Monday does not mean you have to do so. We counsel that the meeting leader needs to consider whether or not a meeting is really necessary, due to the expense of employees' salaries spent away from productive work. Is there another way to contact the people that need to be contacted, and what is the nature of the transaction? You might be able to e-mail, for example, instead of calling people together for a grand meeting. Very frequently, we find that people are good technically and are promoted to positions of management because of their technical expertise. So they'll say, "Oh let's have a meeting," and they don't consider how serious that is in terms of the expense. If they figured out they were going to take an hour of employees' time, combined all of the attendees and considered how much that was going to cost, they'd probably consider it more seriously before calling a meeting.

We also counsel that a meeting leader needs to submit an agenda to the people who should attend three days in advance and, as part of that agenda, name the objective of the meeting. Meeting leaders either tend not to know about sending an agenda or tend not take the time to do so. Even in academe, people call meetings and I see them preparing the agenda the night before. We're all busy, but if you're going to spend time together for a purpose and you want to get the most productive behavior out of your people, then you must prepare an agenda.

In our experience, frequently what happens is that people are given information and then expected to problem solve and make decisions, all in the same meeting. And they cannot do that. So we advise sending information people need to read ahead of time along with your agenda, so they can prepare for the meetings. When they come prepared, you can go directly into problem solving and decision making, and not have it be such a harangue of a meeting.

All: What are some ways that managers can keep meetings on track if it appears that attendees' attention is starting to wander?
Smith: When meeting leaders prepare an agenda, it should have no more than five items. You put the most important items first, because those are the ones that people tend to spend the longest amount of time on. If you're going to have an hour meeting, there's no way you are going to be able to cover more than five items. Yet I find that very frequently people expect to be able to cover up to 20 items. By the time you've reached the end, everyone is too exhausted to care. So if you think of the purpose of your meeting and five items you need to discuss to achieve the objective, that helps you stay on track. If people start trailing off and telling personal stories or you have a know-it-all that objects to everything and stalls the meeting, then the meeting leader can simply say, "That’s not the objective for this particular meeting. But let’s make a list of things we can talk about in our next meeting." Then physically make the list or have someone do it for you. This way, people feel their needs are being addressed, and they are willing to stop talking so you can go on with the meeting.

The meeting leader has to be very focused in order to be able to sense when people are going off track. Even as an attendee you can say, "I think we're getting off track. Can we get back to that and deal with this other later?" That's a polite way of getting back on track and getting the meeting going. If people are bored, they are going to have side conversations and the meeting will quickly go into shambles if the meeting leader doesn't keep bringing them back to the topic and ensuring that they remain focused.

All: Is meeting management beginning to get more attention from companies?
Smith: In organizational leadership, you have to consider efficiency and effectiveness in everything you do. I think that as people more and more are going into part-time work and billable hours, people see the waste of time that some meetings are. If you are paying people to be at meetings if they needn't be there or they are not adding productively to the task, that's something that as companies continue to watch the bottom line, they consider to be more important. Also, meetings impact morale. There is nothing worse than dragging to a meeting where you are not going to have any input, and your presence is not required, and you're going to have to listen to a great amount of droning on. It wallops your morale and makes you less willing to attend meetings in the future.