Chapter 7 Leading Productive Management Meetings (BO,Connie)

Deciding when a meeting is the best forum

•Achieving the required result
•Establishing objectives, outcomes, and agenda
•Performing essential planning
•Clarifying roles and establishing ground rules
•Using common problem-solving techniques
•Managing meeting problems
•Ensuring follow-up occurs

Completing the essential planning

•Clarifying purpose and expected outcome
•Determining topics for the agenda
•Selecting attendees
•Considering the setting
•Determining when to meet
•Establishing needed meeting information

Conducting a productive meeting

•Deciding on the decision-making approach
•Clarifying leader and attendee roles and responsibilities
•Establishing meeting ground rules
•Using common problem-solving approaches

Managing meeting problems and conflict

•Handling specific meeting problems
•Managing meeting conflict
•Dealing with cultural differences

Ensuring meetings lead to action

•Assign specific tasks to specific people.
•Review all actions and responsibilities at the end of the meeting.
•Provide a meeting summary with assigned deliverables included.
•Follow up on action items in a reasonable time.

Use the following questions to direct you in deciding to meet or not:

•What is the purpose? What do I hope to accomplish?
•Will a meeting accomplish that purpose more efficiently? More effectively?
•Can I describe exactly the outcome I am seeking from the meeting?
•Is our group more productive when we meet?

To ensure your meetings are productive, you must conduct the necessary planning by answering the following questions:

•What should be included on the agenda?
•Who should attend?
•What is the purpose and expected outcome?
•What is the best setting?
•What is the best timing?
•What information will we need for the meeting?
•What is the purpose and expected outcome?









•People don’t take meetings seriously.
•Meetings are too long.
•People wander off the topic.
•Nothing happens once the meeting ends.
•People don’t tell the truth.
•Meetings are always missing important information, so they postpone critical decisions.
•Meetings never get better.


Common analytical tools that work well in many different types of problem-solving meetings are:

•Brainstorming.
•Ranking or rating.
•Sorting by category (logical grouping).
•Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats.
•Opposition analysis.
•Decision trees.
•From/ to analysis.
•Force-field analysis.
•The matrix.
•Frameworks.

The 'Six Thinking Hats' is a quick, simple and powerful technique to improve your thinking. It does this by encouraging you to recognize what type of thinking you are using, and to apply different types of thinking to the subject

•The White Hat is cold, neutral, and objective.

Take time to look at the facts and information.

•The Red Hat represents anger (seeing red).

Take time to listen to your emotions, your intuition.

•The Black Hat is gloomy and negative.

Take time to look at why this will fail.

•The Yellow Hat is sunny and positive.

Take time to be hopeful and optimistic.

•The Green Hat is grass, fertile and growing.

Take time to be creative and cultivate new ideas.

•The Blue Hat is the color of the sky, high above us all.

Take time to look from a higher and wider perspective

to see whether you are addressing the right issue.