1) Have a specific purpose and goal for the meeting.
2) Only have agenda items that support and accomplish that goal. (If you have multiple goals for one meeting, then you run the chance of wasting valuable time for the people that are only interested/involved in one of the goals. Call different “shorter” meetings instead).
3) Only invite people that have the authority to “do something” to accomplish the meeting’s goal.
4) Setup and publish the meeting’s purpose, ground-rules, time-limits and explicit agenda-topics.
5) Have a note-taker that is not expected to actually participate in the meeting to take notes and publish the notes (you can now include video taping or audio taping of the meetings as well — but you still want someone to quickly summarize the results and action items)
6) Always do an end-game review:
- Review/Summarize the highlights and decision;
- Decide if the meeting’s purpose and goal was actually accomplished;
- Emphasize the “Call to Action” items;
- Identify the explicit owners for each Action Item;
- Assign a deadline or time-frame for the item;
- Clarify the success criteria for each Action item (make sure everyone in the room has the same understanding of what DONE really means in this specific issue – make sure everyone has the same expectations);
- if it was decided that the meeting was not successful in completing it’s goal – Outline any remaining Open Items,
- Specify the date/time for the next meeting if there are any Open Items and who is in charge of facilitating and who should be attending that next meeting.
Often times meetings are unsuccessful because they simply do not have the right people in the meeting to make the decisions. If you have a specific goal for each meeting, you can decide early on if the meeting has the right people to accomplish the goal. If the right people are not there – do not proceed with the meeting OR have the right meeting for the people that are there.