Effective meetings

PREPARATION: GET EVERYONE ON SAME PAGE

The biggest challenge of a meaningful meeting is keeping the discussion on the agenda.

Board meetings or general dayto-day meetings are an essential component of running a business. They are, in fact, the formal mechanism used for strategy conceptualisation, progress reporting and discussions on major decisions, among a host of other items.

Meetings are a powerful tool for success if conducted effectively but if not, they are simply a waste of time.

Therefore an effective meeting must have the following components:

Agenda: As obvious as this might sound, it is alarming how many meetings do not have a clear, concise agenda. For example, calling for a strategy meeting can mean a myriad of things. Be specific and say for example, “a strategy meeting to deal with the lack of compliance in the human resources department”.

Send agenda well before time: Effective meetings require every participant to be well prepared. That requires you to send the agenda in advance, to allow participants to wrap their minds around it and attend with solutions.

Content: It’s crucial to send the right content in advance with the agenda. Inaccurate or incomplete information will hinder participants from fully understanding the matter and they will subsequently fail to develop the right solutions.

Schedule adequate time: Based on the

agenda, you must assign enough time for the matter to be comprehensively discussed. Additionally, you must leave room for error – as we all know, meetings can go beyond the specified duration.

Keep within time: Don’t allow the meeting to drag on for hours on end. Effective meetings are not long meetings. You as the chair must control the boardroom and put time constraints on discussion matters and each participant’s speaking time.

Stick to the agenda: The biggest challenge of an effective meeting is keeping the discussion on the agenda. In a business, operations are intertwined, therefore it is not difficult to drift to other matters that aren’t on the agenda.

Contribution: An effective meeting requires contribution from all participants. Sometimes meetings have dominating personalities that take over the meeting. You must control the meeting by giving every individual a chance to speak. Great solutions come from a diversity of ideas.

Limit the number of meetings: Meetings can become redundant. Therefore, make your meetings concise, to the point and only call them when necessary – that way you and your employees can free yourselves up to implement what was discussed in the meeting.

Munya Duvera is chief executive at Duvera Elgroup

Don’t allow the meeting to drag on for hours on end. Effective meetings are not long. You, as the chair, must control the boardroom and put time constraints on discussion matters.