Incredibly Effective Meetings

Here are ten signs that your organization has an incredibly effective high performance meeting culture.

1. At the start of each meeting, the first point of discussion is: “What are we trying to achieve in this meeting?”
2. At the end of the meeting, all actions are summarized.
3. At the end of the meeting, all decisions are summarized.
4. Each action has an owner who is accountable for taking the action. 
5. Actions can only be assigned to participants who are at the meeting.
6. A meeting has only three purposes:
   • To drive a project
   • To generate ideas
   • To make decisions
7. Meeting time is never set at a default value (such as one hour).
8. Without agenda, there is no meeting.
9. Regular meetings are terminated every six months. If the meeting is valuable, participants can decide to extend the regular meeting schedule for another six months.
10. If consensus is reached on difficult decisions quickly, the decision will be postponed: Clearly the issue hasn’t been given enough thought.

This leaves us with three questions:

• On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate your meetings on each of these points?
• Where is your biggest opportunity for improvement?
• What one thing will you change today as a result?  

Photo Credit: iStockPhoto/olm26250