Running Effective Meetings For Dummies

Chapter 17

Ten Things to Say to Move a Meeting Along

IN THIS CHAPTER

Stopping a meeting from going off track

Politely interrupting a monologuer

Taking back control of the conversation

Even though you may be a meeting’s official leader, there will be times when you’ll feel like your meeting has a mind of its own.

You carefully laid out a plan for a productive dialogue that will get you to your ultimate goal, to make a decision on a key business initiative. But somehow, 30 minutes in, you haven’t even made it past agenda item number one, and there are ten on the list. What’s even worse, the meeting’s lively conversation isn’t even tangentially related to what you had planned to discuss.

How did this happen?

Meetings are made up of people, and no matter how much planning you put into them, personalities of those in attendance can often heavily influence what happens during the proceedings. Sometimes, those personalities can hijack your meeting and make it less effective than you want it to be.

In Chapter 11, we talk about procedural communication (things you can say to allow you to accomplish a meeting goal). Sometimes those statements are designed to wrest control back from meeting ...