Effective Business Meetings: Types, Phases & Best Practices
Types of Meetings
Meetings can be categorized based on their primary purpose:
- Information sharing
- Problem analysis
- Forecasting
- Decision-making
- Planning and control
Phases of a Meeting
A typical meeting progresses through these phases:
- Call, Greeting, and Initial Contact: Setting the tone and establishing rapport.
- Issue Approach: Clearly defining the meeting’s objectives and agenda.
- Discussion of Alternatives: Exploring various options and perspectives.
- Discussion and Closing: Summarizing key points, reaching conclusions, and documenting decisions.
- Record and Follow-Up: Distributing minutes and tracking action items.
Meeting Preparation
Effective preparation is crucial. Consider these factors:
- Timing: Schedule the meeting appropriately.
- Participants: Invite relevant stakeholders.
- Choice of Time and Place: Select a suitable time and location.
- Agenda: Create a clear and concise agenda.
- Presentation of the Topic: Prepare materials to introduce the subject matter effectively.
Fundamentals of a Successful Meeting
Management style significantly influences the type of meeting. Keep these fundamentals in mind:
- Avoid imposing roles.
- Criticism should be constructive.
- Active listening is essential.
- Repetition can clarify and strengthen arguments.
- Selective summaries are helpful.
- A meeting is a place where all members can review, modify, and augment their knowledge.
Meeting Objectives
Meetings serve multiple objectives:
- Enable participants to develop ideas and views that support decision-making.
- Provide an opportunity for mutual information sharing.
- Facilitate a better understanding of leadership decisions.
- Allow team members to express their ideas openly, fostering a positive social climate.
- Address team member needs and promote identification with company ideals and objectives.
Key Characteristics of a Meeting Coordinator
An effective coordinator should be:
- Open
- Adaptable
- Democratic
- Orderly
- A good synthesizer
- A good communicator
- Self-confident
- Empathetic
- Sensitive
- Collaborative
- Sociable
The coordinator should avoid being dogmatic, dismissive, destructive, or authoritarian. There are two main types of coordinators: authoritarian and democratic.
Problems That Arise in Meetings
Common meeting challenges include:
- No one breaks the silence.
- Someone requests clarification on an agenda item as an additional fact.
- Someone whispers to another participant.
- One participant presents a multitude of arguments.
- Someone is distracted.
- A member is not participating.
- A participant is consistently disruptive.
- Someone makes overt gestures of disapproval or skepticism.
- The team is repeating the same idea and feels stagnant.
- The discussion revolves solely around negative arguments.
- Two participants engage in a personal dispute.
- One participant dominates the discussion and disrupts others.
- There is tiredness among participants.
- The discussion moves from one point to another without resolution.
- A late intervention disrupts the flow.
- There is discouragement and disorientation.
Meeting Test
Here are some key takeaways about meetings:
- In meetings, professional active power is important.
- Meetings should address, provide, and make information available.
- Decision-making meetings aim to find solutions to problems.
- The minutes of a meeting should inform, monitor, and record decisions.
- It is advisable to schedule a meeting before the end of the workday, for example, 12:30 PM.
- A democratic meeting coordinator is characterized by giving all team members information.
- Constructive criticism should not be focused on the person, insincere, or intended to be hurtful.
- At the start of a meeting where nobody is talking, the director should restate the problem, calling it fearlessly and putting it on display.