Summarize Leadership Chapter 7: Leading Productive Management Meeting

This chapter focuses on how 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. First, performing essential planning, you need to define a clear purpose and analyze your audience to determine whether a meeting is the best forum for what you want to accomplish. Your main purpose for meeting might be to inform, but could also intend to persuade or even to instruct in the same meeting. You need determine topics for the agenda that should follow directly from the objectives and end products and should contain the information about timing and objectives. The attendees you invite should be the ones who can contribute to achieving your objectives. You should consider the setting that includes location, equipment, and layout of the room. For on-site meeting, you should establish ground rules that attempt to protect the meeting time as if it were off-site. Setting the time for the meeting can be important. To accomplish your goals, you want people when they are at their best. You should think about people’s schedules and commitments as much as possible. Finally, you will want to anticipate and provide any information the group may need before or during the meeting to accomplish the meeting purpose.
If you have not done so beforehand, announce at the start of the meeting the decision-making approach that you plan to use, clarify leader and attendee roles and responsibilities, and establish meeting ground rules. In addition, the meeting will be more productive if your attendees know and use common problem-solving tools such as 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, and Frameworks.
The primary responsibilities of a meeting leader are to plan the meeting, provide the content, anticipate problems, and ensure process facilitation. Fulfilling the last responsibility may call for the use of a skilled facilitator. A facilitator’s primary responsibility is to ensure process problems do no interfere with the success of the meeting. Facilitators help to keep the meeting focused on the objectives and ensure redirection if it gets off track. Skilled facilitators should be prepared to (1) handle some of the most common meeting problems, (2) manage meeting conflict, and (3) deal with issues arising from cultural differences.