chapter7: Leading Productive Management Meeting

This chapter shows the way to plan and conduct productive meeting by determining when a meeting is the best forum for achieving the required result; establishing objectives, outcomes and agenda; performing essential essential planning; clarify roles and establishing ground rules; using common problem-solving techniques; managing meeting problems; and ensure follow-up the occurs. This chapter focuses on primarily on small group meeting intended to accomplish tasks or move actions forward inside an organization .

Deciding when a meeting is the best forum: You need to define a clear purpose and analyze your audience to determine whether a meeting is the best forum for what would you want to accomplish. Even without what appears to be a specific business purpose, meeting periodically can be beneficial. In company meeting, people see others they may not ordinarily see and feel connected to a large group. Meeting with no specific business objective might have motivation, recreation, or networking purpose- all potentiallly important in certain organization contexts. Referring to the three typical purposes for communication in business -that is. to inform, to persuade, or to instruct-will help you decide.

Completing the essential planning: you will need to decide about th epurpose, outcomes, agenda, setting, timing, and materials. To ensure your meeting are productive, you must conduct the necessary planning.

• clarifying purpose and expected Outcome -care to define your one main overall purpose-
• determining topics for the agenda -estimate the time to cover each topic-
• selecting attendees -right attendees match with an objective-
• considering the setting -location,equipment and layout of the rooms-
• determining when to meet -people's schedules & commitments- no longer about 60-90 mins.
• establishing needed meeting information -provide info to the group before or during the meeting

Next when the meeting conduct a productive meeting. you should consider a common problem-solving tools are as follows: 1) Brainstorming 2) Ranking or rating 3) sorting by category 4) Edward de Bono's six thinking hats 5) opposition analysis 6) decision trees 7) from/to analysis 8)force-field analysis 9) the matrix 10) frameworks

One of the most important responsibilities is to manage the problem and conflicts. Negative thinking and resistance to the ideas of others or changes of any kind are two common problem we found in the meeting. We can stop negativity by setting a ground rule. There are some techniques to manage resistance; verify, clarify, align and probe technique. We can manage the conflict by applying different levels of assertiveness and cooperation. Culture differences concern should be realized to narrow and limit the potential conflict. The last step is ensuring meeting lead to action by assigning specific tasks to specific people, reviewing all actions and responsibilities at the end of the meeting, providing a meeting summary with assigned deliverables included, and following up on action items in a reasonable time.