Take Back Control of Your Meetings

In an office of college educated design professionals the managers should know and be able to follow the basic rules of meeting etiquette. Surprisingly, many of them do not and it sets a bad example to the rest of the staff. Poorly run meetings can be tiring, demeaning and exhausting.

Our design office typically has 70 to 90 active projects, 40 staff, and 15 project managers. As the scheduling coordinator, it is my job to solicit staffing requests from the project managers, consolidate it into one document, and review it weekly with all the managers. And the principals. And the finance department. This is a high-dollar meeting. We meet every Friday morning to make sure we have assigned the appropriate staff to each project. As leader of the meeting, I continue to be astounded at their lack of skills in the area of meeting etiquette.

Rule Breakers
1. Arriving more than 5 minutes late and announcing to all that they have to leave in 20 minutes
2. Using the meeting as a work-session instead of a reporting session
3. Looking at other papers (contracts, meeting minutes, letters, etc.) that are unrelated to the meeting.
4. Checking their email and sending text messages from their hand held
5. Striking up side bar discussions with the person next to them or worse, with the person sitting across the table from them. And worse than worse is when their cross-conversation is between the leader and the rest of the participants.
6. Heaving a deep sigh when they thought the meeting should be over and asking “Are we done yet?”

All my emails telling them to come prepared, to get there on time and to stay engaged in the meeting were not effective. Some of the people did change their ways but the ones who didn’t want to be told what to do continued to do it their way. And, since they are generally one of my bosses, it was a tricky situation indeed.

These meetings would often drag on for an hour or longer.

The difficulty I had in leading these meetings is that I wasn’t leading the meeting – it was leading me.

When I finally had enough and I didn’t care if I hurt their feelings or interfered with their power plays, I decided to enact some changes. This is what I did and it has been successful ever since.

1. Notify them in advance
I sent out an email the afternoon before the meeting to advise them to expect some changes to our meeting format. It included an agenda based on a 45 minute meeting. The beginning section, 5 minutes long, was for general announcements specific to the upcoming meeting. The middle section, 30 minutes long, was to take care of the bulk of the meeting. The wrap-up section, 10 minutes long, was to make sure that as a group, we had taken care of all projects and all staff.

2. Mentally prepare for the challenge
I visualized what might transpire at the meeting and prepared some phrases that I would use to get the meeting back on track. Being ready to say “that sounds like a topic for further discussion at another time” or “is [your side bar conversation] relevant to the rest of the meeting?” was instrumental in my success.

3. Begin the meeting on time and announce the expectations
Not everyone read my email and even if they did, they might not have taken it seriously. I told them that I would be trying to keep these meetings on track, to start and end on time, and to keep everyone engaged for the duration. I told them that these are the initial guidelines but if they thought we should add to them, to let me know.

4. Keep an eye on the clock
There’s no point in setting this type of agenda if you don’t follow the clock. On the other hand, you don’t want to sacrifice discussions or contributions just to beat the clock.

5. Squelch the sidebar conversations
This had become so routine in our meetings that I felt this would be one of my hardest challenges in regaining control. As soon as I started to hear or see people talking with each other, I started my mental 10-second clock and if they were still talking after 10 seconds, I stopped the main conversation and said, “Just a minute, Joe, there’s another discussion going on at the other end of the table and I want to find out if we need to include their input in what we’re going over with you.” Then, I turned to those two people and asked if what they were talking about was relevant to our other conversation. Most of the time, the answer was no, but there were a few times when it turned out that their side bar really needed to be heard by the rest of the group. This method was very effective, because it let everyone know that we were going to have one meeting at a time and if you tried to have a sub-meeting, I was going to call you on it.

6. Announce the end of the meeting
In the first meeting where I used this stronger approach, we finished right on time. The following week, we finished in a record 25 minutes. By the third week, they were getting more accustomed to the format and came prepared. It is now acceptable for any of them to say, “Can we move this along?” and it not be a personal attack.

Results
Shorter meeting = appreciative co-workers
It’s a win-win for everyone. Even those who used this meeting as a platform for proselytizing their point of view have had to find another venue to find a captive audience.