How Effective Are Your Meeting Management?
If you want meetings to be productive, contributory, collection, and collation of best brainstorming, there are skills and knowledge needed to be called Effective Meeting Management. See;
- Organizations gather for annual general meetings with little or no achievement distinct from the previous one than partying, shows, and in some places fights.
- Churches, ministries, or mosques gather for annual youth, men, or women conventions with no more achievements than their routine weekly program would have achieved, the highest some comedies, dancing, and dining.
- Old boys, and old girls [alumni, or alumnus] gather for an annual general meeting or reunion fellowship with no significant achievement than a mere meeting and get-together.
- Companies gather for annual retreats with not much leapfrog at the end of the meeting than the CEO/MD reading riot acts and releasing threats of sacks and demotion to staff after self-adulations.
- Heads of Departments, Heads of Units, Heads of Committees, and Managers call for departments, units, and committees meetings without proper agenda to move the group forward than lampooning a hated staff/member.
Why? Why is the Cause?
Many Heads of organizations, groups, and teams may not have been schooled or educated in the act of mobilization for maximum productivity.
Many Heads, Managers, even GMs and CEOs/MDs are irritants to their subordinates/subjects, and given a choice the members/staff would not like to attend such meetings they call for or convey. The worst, the “koko” of the matter is many Local Organizing Committee [LOC], Heads, Managers, Pastors, CEOs, and meeting Conveyors have not been taught, sold to, and equipped to understand the skills, knowledge, and attitude of conveying productive regular and non-regular effective meetings.
Most meetings are not productive. They may be attended because of being mandatory [compelled to], or strict compulsion placed on attendance.
There are many things more important than meetings, for instance, progress, assigning tasks, and actioning tasks; these can be achieved with or without meetings, but because more good heads are better than one, says the Holy Book, meeting becomes desirable.
Meetings can provide a forum for brainstorming, rejuvenating, and regurgitating ideas in the heads of a few persons than just one. Meetings can be a place of knocking out, sandpapering, and panel-beating of thoughts.
But most meetings don’t achieve these objectives. They are mostly carried away by exuberances, excitement, and fantasies that the meeting is coming up. This is more especially for annual or biennial meetings, rather than daily/weekly meetings.
Some years ago I belong to an association and was an EXCO [Executive Committee] member when the EXCO meeting was called, I felt, “it is useless” for two reasons. One, my position as an EXCO requires my presence unavoidably more than other EXCOs indeed. So, I am compelled to despite hating attending it. Two, the president of our association was irritating, full of himself, arrogant, and power drunk. So, I don’t like being in the same room with such irritant brag. Definitely, such a setting of EXCO leadership meetings will not achieve much, and we did not.
In one of the organizations I belong to, any time the Head of Department [HOD] calls for a meeting, I try to ask for agenda [which will be refused] from all persons. I hate attending the meetings because the HoD will waste 50% of the allotted time lampooning one person she hates, and the rest attendees will be trying to separate fights or quarrels. Wasteful, irritant head. They exist everywhere, maybe in your workplace.
If you want your meetings to be productive, contributory, and collation of best brainstorming, there are skills and know-how needed. It is called Meetings Management. I’m not talking about event management.
- What about planning for meetings?
- Drafting of Meeting Minutes? Drafting AGM Communique?
- Organizing Meetings?
- Achieving Dream Local Organizing Committee?
- Handling Meetings after Meetings?
- Handling Meetings before Meetings?
- Negotiating/Bargaining Before, During and After Meetings?
- Dealing with influencers & powerbrokers in Meetings?
Don’t assume that as a chairman/president of a group you can rise up and summon and achieve maximal productivity anyhow if you have never been to the School of Effective Meeting Management. You can convey, but achieving a productive and effective objective is another kettle of fish.
For Whom
Every Supervisor, Manager, GM, CEO of organizations, President / Chairman of clubs/associations, EXCOs of all groups, Pastors, Team leaders, and in fact whoever conveys and moderates meetings be it conferences, conventions, workshops, AGMs, and regular meetings supposed to attend this effectiveness course. But I can help you.
This effective lifestyle is not instinctive, it is knowledge and skill.
Mike Ihezuo provides you with this Effective Meeting Management LIVE or ZOOM as you like for you and the team. Reach him on his e-handles: leadermikeo@gmail.com, https://mikeihezuospeaks.net/
