| There are many different types of meetings, so you will need to give some additional color on yours (number of people, frequency, is it within a team, cross team etc). Effective meetings are hard. I struggle moderating them constantly. Here’s what I learnt: - Be clear about the purpose of the meeting - is it knowledge sharing, is it to kick people’s butts to progress towards a goal, is it to build camaraderie, etc. Information sharing can be much looser in structure, a project meeting needs to be run with a more tight agenda. A social meeting should be relaxed and have avenues to break the ice - Always keep meeting minutes (unless it’s a social focused meeting) and write down who will do what afterwards (and follow up on those points). Even if the first few times it’s unsuccessful, eventually it will improve overall discipline. However sometimes it’s an uphill battle that can’t be won - imperfection is okay, people are lazy and won’t do everything they agreed to do in a time manner. Just push them in the right direction - Focus on the important things, make sure they are covered off in the meeting. Thus, meeting prep is vital - plan the interactions as much as possible in your head and write the goal you want to achieve from the meeting - Don’t hold unnecessary meetings. Respect people’s time as much as possible - Practice makes perfect. There are so many combinations of types of meetings that you just need to develop a feel for them - Try and understand the personalities of who is attending. This will give you strategies to make the meeting more effective. For example a decision maker who never replies to emails and takes too long to make a decision - you want to pin them down in the meeting and gently pressure them to come to a conclusion, because once the meeting is over, they will spend another week procrastinating! Others like to work together and chat more, for them, meetings help give energy to move towards common goals. Others are less social and want to focus on doing work, those meetings should be much more concise and direct Hope that helps |