The prospect of successfully running a meeting can be daunting for anyone at any level. It is easy to find yourself in a meeting where little to nothing seems to get achieved. I can’t promise this won’t happen to you, but here are a few tips to try and avoid such a meeting to occuring under your watch.
Obviously, distractions and surprises need to be kept to a minimum. So, to begin with, make sure you have checked precisely who is attending the meeting in the first place. If there’s any names you don’t recognize, make sure to follow up. LinkedIn is a useful tool for this if your company’s database is failing you.
Alongside checking all those attending your meeting beforehand, check the actual content of your meeting too and form an agenda. It’s easy enough to get caught in a tangent at the best of times, but a meeting you’re running is not the place to do so.
This brings us into the realm of time management. Every second counts in this type of setting. When you are creating your agenda for the meeting try and work out the time you wish to spend on each area. This, alongside with some subtle clock watching allows you to make sure one particular point doesn’t end up dominating. To be on the safe side make sure you the most important points are covered early on in your agenda, so that you’re not rushed at the end at the most critical parts.
If you are regularly running a meeting such as a weekly project meeting, hopefully you will have a regular venue to do so. When the meeting is a one off, however, the right venue can be particularly important. There’s nothing worse than there being more people than there are chairs, or not having the right outputs/inputs for your presentation that you worked on the whole evening before. If you’re looking for a Manchester meeting room for hire, options are are plentiful, allowing you to search for your venue based on a combination capacity, venue type, price, location. This allows you to tailor a venue to your specific meeting, hopefully avoiding those faux pas which can derail a meeting.
Finally, make sure you follow up on the meeting. Make basic notes during the meeting, then if you can try and follow up on key points or issues raised the same day via an email to try and tackle any of the problems early on.