meetings

Meetings take place at every organization just about every day. How each organization plans, executes and follows up on their meetings ultimately helps decide on how effective the group can be. As organizations conduct meetings, understanding obstacles such as the seven deadly sins of meetings, can help leaders and meeting planners circumvent potential issues and focus on creating positive meeting atmospheres. Focusing on number four in the seven deadly sins of meetings, nothing happens once the meeting ends, can greatly improve the positive momentum of most meetings. While meetings can have many hurdles, but with focus and action leaders can overcome obstacles by ensuring that action is being taken. Leaders and meeting facilitators can ensure action will be taken by understanding and following four simple steps.

When groups work together often times the team members may not as engaged when given a broad team goal. It is important to assign specific tasks to specific people so that the individuals will have a higher level of accountability and greater sense of responsibility to finish their specific assigned task (Barrett, 2011). I recently encountered this situation at a sales meeting within our channel. Our sales team of 25 had goal of 250 points of distribution for a new product we just rolled out. In the past we would be informed of the channel goal and to do our part to help achieve the best results, this often ended with team members not performing as expected and stating they did their best to contribute to the goal. Learning from the vagueness of the assigned tasks leadership began not telling the team of the overall goal, but rather assigning and tracking individual goals that added up to the overall channel goal i.e. ...

... middle of paper ...

... ensure all information is clear. I immediately save and add these appointments to my calendar as they have saved me on more than one occasion. This method is appropriate for our business, but I could see how other company’s might like to send their follow up using an email or memo, either way in order to be effective the communication needs to delivered in a reasonable amount of time.

All things considered, covering all bases to ensure all meetings lead to action can be quite basic if a few simple stages are followed. While most meetings have a flaw or two one an area of focus should be to ensure topics covered are understood, retained and tasks are executed. With the proper knowledge and with a bit of practice meeting planners and leaders can begin making a habit of following the four steps and this will lead to better action and more positive results.