Effective Team Meetings: Strategies for Success
Understanding Meetings
Meetings are a common activity in any enterprise. They serve to plan, coordinate, and make decisions within the team. However, ensuring their effectiveness is not an easy task.
What are Meetings?
A meeting is an activity in which a group of people or a team communicates with each other in a certain time and space to find joint solutions to achieve a specific objective.
Characteristics of a Meeting
- Requires a group of people
- Fluid and constant communication among attendees
- A specific location during a given time
- Attendees make decisions by agreement
- Requires a specific target
The objectives of a meeting can be very varied:
- Report on a topic
- Disseminate knowledge
- Solve a problem
- Expose new ideas, approaches, and procedures
- Analyze, assess, and plan strategies for action, working methods, new products, or services
- Coordinate roles of team members
When calling or attending a meeting in which the objective is not clearly defined, there is a loss of time that is very negative in the workplace.
In every meeting, there are two dimensions:
- Dimension of Knowledge: Attendees solicit or bring information on the issue raised, formulate opinions, make suggestions, or ask to solve problems.
- Socioemotional Dimension: Attendees express agreement or disagreement with the views of others, are relaxed or tense, and they help or confront one another.
Participants in the Meeting
Determining who should attend a meeting is one of the most important tasks before calling it. It will determine the success or failure of the meeting. It is important to carefully select the participants because not everybody can take advantage of or is enabled to contribute information, ideas, opinions, or solutions.
There are two types of participants:
- The moderator/driver/animator/director
- Other members of the group/team
Moderator’s Role and Responsibilities
The moderator’s role is to direct, guide, and coordinate the meeting.
- State the issue or issues to be addressed
- Moderate the discussions: Organize speaking turns, limit interventions according to the time available, and avoid verbal confrontations
- Try to reach an agreement
- Create a climate of trust and cordiality
- Promote communication and team cohesion
- Revitalize the meeting
- Summarize and synthesize the main points of the meeting and the agreements and compromises reached
Any member of a team can play one or more roles. Being a moderator is not an easy task that can be placed on any person. A moderator requires technical knowledge of the item being treated as well as psychological knowledge to enhance and control its members. They must also have certain personal qualities:
- Positive
- Open
- Impartial
- Cordial
- Animator
- Involved
- Mediator
- Regulator
- Sensitive
- Able to think
Participant’s Responsibilities
You’ve probably heard people in your environment say many times, “What a pointless meeting I had today.” The organization of the meeting must meet very specific goals. The participant should develop the following functions:
- Participate actively and constructively
- Present ideas clearly and autonomously
- Listen to others, accept and respect their views, and propose alternatives if they do not agree
- Focus on the topic or themes without deviation
- Respect the order of items and rules of operation that the moderator sets
- Propose useful suggestions for the proper functioning of the group
- Try to ease tensions