Corks and Ductape?
November 26th, 2006 by Kate Carleton
Are you wasting valuable time trapped in meetings? Meetings that go no where? How many times has the “blame game” started at a meeting?…”It was his fault, she didn’t do it, I never got the email, etc…” How about the team member who avoids answering the question when something has gone wrong or how about the guy who continually manipulates and dominates the conversations?
Comedian Dave Barry says “If you had to identify in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved and will never achieve it’s full potential, that word would be MEETINGS.” So, how do you control “meeting madness”? You’re probably thinking- corks and ductape, that would do it or maybe eliminate the team members from attending meetings altogether. Well, that’s one way, but there are many other ways. Here are a few ideas.
- Have a pre-meeting agenda, emailed out in bullet point format ahead of time.
- Create meeting ground rules with an enforcer and a time dragon. Those jobs are perfect for the talkers, as it gives them something to do instead of talking.
- Ground rules determined by the players and could be something like: topics are given priority level and approximate time needed for discussion, dumping on others ideas or interupting constitutes $1 towards the birthday fund. Others rules could be: Each person gets a minute to talk on an idea or can pass, leader calls to vote and moves on to next. Again, to be determined by players.
- Scribe responsibilities are rotated and emailed after meeting with conclusions and the next steps with time to be completed and by whom.
The ultimate goal here is create an environment open for dialogue, increase meeting productivity and effectiveness, as well as, start to train corporate professionals to have connecting conversations that build the team, create new ideas, and expand possibilities. Save the ductape for repairing your car, it comes in handy.
- Kate -
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