Making meetings meaningful

Long and meandering meetings are the object of much ridicule in the corporate world today. Dilbert's boss in one of his Scott Adams strip remarks that sometimes the only point of a meeting is to remind him as to how much he hates them!!

However, the fact remains that the much maligned tool of meetings is absolutely essential to get anything accomplished at the workplace. Here are some pointers to achieve the most of meetings and avoid the obvious pitfalls.

1. Start with an end objective in mind: Seems obvious but does not always happen. Is it an update meeting, pep talk or is there a decision to be made at the end? Drive the meeting accordingly and keep distractions to the minimum.

2. Aim for keeping agenda simple: Many a time people come out of a meeting completely confused without knowing the central message of the meeting. Trying to get too many things achieved in one meeting is generally not a good idea. Keep it simple; define outcomes to be achieved and layout the road map. Summarizing at the end is always a good idea. Walter Isaacson writes in his famous biography of Steve Jobs that in one particular product strategy meeting at Apple when the discussions were going nowhere, Jobs screamed and shut everybody up.

He then proceeded to the drawing board and drew a horizontal and vertical line to make a four-squared chart. Atop the two columns he wrote "Consumer" and "Pro" and next to the two rows he wrote "Desktop" and "Portable." He told the team that they needed four great products, one for each quadrant. The room was in dumb silence.

3. Circulate reading material before the meeting: If the meeting has to deliberate some important and lengthy reports from a consultant or committee's findings, circulate such material before the meeting. If possible, create an executive summary of the document and highlight what you would like attendees to the meeting to pay particular attention to. This greatly increases the possibility of having a focused meeting.

4. Circulate minutes/ key deliverables after the meeting: Making minutes of a meeting is a boring task and no one likes to take it up. However, circulating minutes helps in freezing actionables and fixing responsibilities for each person. Besides, people have a notoriously short memory and a meeting without minutes could mean going through the exercise all over again.

5. Brainstorm without PowerPoint sometimes: PowerPoint is a great invention which helps us come across in an impressive manner. It also helps in cases where the speaker does not possess great speaking skills. However, of late this tool is widely misused and people add all sorts of junk in their slides making their presentations voluminous and distracting. Steve Jobs felt that PowerPoint robbed people of their ability to think and many times insisted on no use of PowerPoint for product innovation meetings where people had to be at their creative best.

6. Ensure presence of key stakeholders: You wouldn't want your meeting to end by stating that the decision under consideration needs the views of some other stakeholders who have not been invited to the meeting. Ensure that all those who are needed attend the meeting.

7. Ensure that only those who need to be there are there: We have attended numerous meetings in our corporate life where the boss ensured that 50 per cent of the office turned up for the meeting! Meetings have to be serious business if they have to achieve anything of note and nothing is achieved when it becomes a tool of appeasement where all and sundry are invited.

8. Excuse yourself if you are attending a meeting where you are not needed: It is ok to ask your boss if you are really needed for the meeting. Tell him that you expect to achieve much more by staying out during that time. Assure him that you will be happy to abide by decisions that are made in your absence.

9. Have an end time: We know one famous corporate honcho who enters a meeting and writes the end time of the meeting on the white board before the meeting starts. That way, everyone knows the finish time and works backward to ensure that their agenda gets completed within the allotted time.

By taking simple steps, it is possible to make meetings meaningful and productive for all concerned.

(The author is Co-founder and CEO of Mumbai-based Consumerge Wealth Managers, which specialises in wealth management, HR consultancy and coaching. He has spent over 25 years in senior management and leadership roles)