Meeting management: Avoiding the stew-and-seethe syndrome

By Chris Hitch

Strategies for keeping meetings on-task, efficient, and productive.

You’re in a conference room with fifteen of your colleagues. In your mind, you stew and seethe as person after person drones on repeating point after point. After three hours, the person chairing the meeting announces, “We need to think about this.” As you gather your planner and say your goodbyes, you mutter under your breath, “How did this meeting get out of hand so quickly? Nothing got done!” Still simmering as you return to your office, you begin to wonder, “How do I keep the meetings I chair from being a waste of time?”

Making a successful meeting

Successful meetings — those that complete their agendas and result in action — do not happen by chance. They require advance planning and strong leadership while they’re occurring. If you want to lead good meetings (and, thereby, win the everlasting admiration of your most effective team members) here are a few tips.

First, don’t blend too many ingredients and try to make the meeting everything for everybody. Don’t succumb to the temptation of covering every extraneous item that comes up. Acknowledge the importance of off-the-agenda subjects — you don’t want to insult your colleagues by being too abrupt — but unless they’re immediately relevant to the point at issue, defer their discussion to another meeting. I’ve adapted a strategy originally authored by Pat Lencioni of the Table Group, that’s especially effective in school settings.

Five-minute stand up

Key ingredient: What’s happening today. Schedule a five-minute stand up meeting with your lead secretary and your assistant principal. Use these 300 seconds to update one another on immediate concerns (field trips, substitute teacher issues, assemblies, etc.). This quick get-together can help ensure that no activities are missed and can also clarify what’s important to discuss at the larger meeting.

Weekly thirty-minute tactical

Key ingredient: Next week’s events. Allow one minute for each person in your team (for instance, your lead secretary, guidance counselor, and assistant principal) to set out his/her priority issues (what each person is focusing on next week). Follow this round of short presentations with a progress review and a proposed agenda for the week ahead. You can also use these weekly meetings to update your leadership team about relevant events from outside the school, such as developments in the central office or school board issues.

Monthly strategic

Key ingredient: Semester or long-term issues. Devote these monthly meetings to a maximum of two or three topics. Make sure these issues are broad enough in scope to interest all (or most of) the meeting’s attendees, then set a time limit and, whatever you do, stick to it.

Conclusion

Effective meetings are an opportunity for you to emphasize your values and solidify the culture in your school or district (the way we do things around here). Settle in advance on only a few, important issues per meeting and then keep your eyes on those precious prizes. You’ll be surprised how productive your team members can be when they’re not stewing and seething.

In a later article, I’ll discuss other practical strategies you can use with your faculty and school improvement team members to move your agenda forward and build relationships in larger groups.