A good meeting is not a series of dialogues between individual members and the chairman. If the discussion is at all likely to be long or complex, the chairman should propose to the meeting a structure for it with headings (written up if necessary), as I stated at the end of the section on “Structure of discussion.” He should listen carefully in case people jump too far ahead (e.g., start proposing a course of action before the meeting has agreed on the cause of the trouble), or go back over old ground, or start repeating points that have been made earlier. However, when the combined experience, knowledge, judgment, authority, and imagination of a half dozen people are brought to bear on issues, a great many plans and decisions are improved and sometimes transformed. And that is three quarters of the trouble. But having said that, and granting that “referring the matter to a committee” can be a device for diluting authority, diffusing responsibility, and delaying decisions, I cannot deny that meetings fulfill a deep human need. The doctor will start with a case history of all the relevant background facts, and so will the committee discussion. This sort of discussion asks people to contribute their knowledge, experience, judgment, and ideas. It is also, oddly enough, the one most likely to be successful. 2. What helps

As Francis Bacon put it—and it has never been put better—“Counsels to which time hath not been called, time will not ratify.”. 3. The Harvard Business Review Classics series now offers you the opportunity to make these seminal pieces a part of your permanent management library..

This “What shall we do?” function embraces all items that require something new to be devised, such as a new policy, a new strategy, a new sales target, a new product, a new marketing plan, a new procedure, and so forth. His first duty, then, is to be aware of the temptation and of the dangers of yielding to it. Some seize the opportunity to impose their will on a group that they see themselves licensed to dominate. But the whole idea is sabotaged once the papers get too long; they should be brief or provide a short summary. He is, in fact, rapidly eliminating all the impossible or far-fetched explanations until he leaves himself with a short list.
He has to head discussion off sterile or irrelevant areas very quickly (e.g., the rights and wrongs of past decisions that it is too late to change, or distant prospects that are too remote to affect present actions). He should try to include, very briefly, some indication of the reason for each topic to be discussed. Between 4 and 7 is generally ideal, 10 is tolerable, and 12 is the outside limit. If you work up the pecking order instead of down it, you are apt to get a wider spread of views and ideas. If so, the fact that the group has the opportunity to formulate the detailed action plan itself may be the decisive factor in securing its agreement, because in that case the final decision belongs, as it were, to the group. 1. It is all too possible that any single meeting may be a waste of time, an irritant, or a barrier to the achievement of the organization’s objectives. We are concerned in this article only with the “committee” meeting though it may be described as a committee, a subcommittee, a study group, a project team, a working party, a board, or by any of dozens of other titles. (One chairman, more noted for his cunning than his conscientiousness, is said to have spent 30 seconds before each meeting going through all the papers he had not read with a thick red pen, marking lines and question marks in the margins at random, and making sure these were accidentally made visible to the meeting while the subject was being discussed.). 1. Meetings are necessary for all sorts of basic and primitive human reasons, but they are useful only if they are seen by all present to be getting somewhere—and somewhere they know they could not have gotten to individually. Not all the findings are generally agreed on. Effective meetings are important to your business to ensure that employees are aligned with your expectations and working efficiently. When the facts are established, you can move toward a diagnosis. This saves much of the time wasting and confusion that result when people raise items in the wrong place because they were not privy to the chairman’s secret that the right place was coming up later on in the discussion. By a majority vote? Their appointment as committee chairman takes people in different ways. A good idea is to write the headings on an easel pad with a felt pen. And when replying or commenting, the chairman can indicate by the speed, brevity, and finality of his intonation that “we have to move on.” Conversely, he can reward the sort of contribution he is seeking by the opposite expressions and intonations, showing that there is plenty of time for that sort of idea, and encouraging the speaker to develop the point. The Right Way to Run a Meeting. 6. The alternative is that the prompt and punctual members will soon realize that a meeting never starts until ten minutes after the advertised time, and they will also learn the lesson.
What does seem true is that: In most meetings someone takes a long time to say very little. Some items unite the meeting in a common front while others divide the member one from another. Questions can only seek, and answers only supply, three types of responses: information, opinion, and suggestion. The order of items on the agenda is important. Sitting side by side makes disagreements and confrontation harder.

Almost everyone is in some way pleased and proud to be made chairman of something. Then the star item can be introduced to carry the meeting over the attention lag that sets in after the first 15 to 20 minutes of the meeting. It is a supreme folly to bring a group of people together to read six pages of closely printed sheets to themselves. If the chairman is to make sure that the meeting achieves valuable objectives, he will be more effective seeing himself as the servant of the group rather than as its master. At the end of a meeting, review actions and assignments, and set the time for the next They recognize that this “social mind” has a special creative power, too. Have we lost market share, or are our competitors’ sales falling too?