Running Effective Meetings For Dummies

Chapter 9

Setting Meeting Expectations

IN THIS CHAPTER

Developing a purposeful, driven meeting agenda

Using pre-work to create a more meaningful meeting

Establishing participation plans

Did you ever look at your calendar for the day and see a mystery meeting — a meeting that is eating up space on your schedule but has no assigned purpose? You try to guess what it might be about by checking out the list of invitees. Hmmm … Carol is going to be there. So is Bob. What do these two have in common that might require us all to be in the same room to chat?

This might seem like a ridiculous scenario, but it plays out over and over and over again. A meeting is scheduled without any context included in the invite. You simply know the location or have the meeting link to click. You may know who will also be in the room if all of the attendees have been listed. However, you have no clue as to why you are all getting together.

Technology has made it really easy to schedule meetings with a few mouse clicks, but it has almost made it too easy. Before you decide to call a meeting, you owe it to the potential participants to really think through why you need the meeting in the first place, what ...