Managing Effective Meetings

Meetings are usually part of a longer and more complex process of trying to achieve a given ‘strategic’ result. They are only effective if the participants have prepared for and contribute proactively to a process that ends up with clear decisions as to who is to do what by when.

The success or otherwise of the meeting will depend to a great extent on the level of engagement in planning and preparation. Consider the following:

Why

• What is the purpose and expected outcome?
  • Share information, feedback, report
  • Generate ideas (brainstorm)
  • Find solutions / Make decisions / Solve Problems
  • Develop trust, relationships, teams
• Who needs to agree the objectives beforehand?
• What do participants want and/or expect?

What

• What items are on the agenda?
• Circulate the agenda in good time (and bring spare copies)
• Prioritise the agenda by indicating how long each item is supposed to take. Note that the most important is not necessarily first.
• Outline what needs to be read beforehand.

Who

• Who should sit at the table, and who behind as ‘advisers’ or ‘observers’?
• Are decision-makers at the table?
• Is there a protocol for invitations and seating arrangements?

Where

• Which is the most suitable venue?
• Does the venue have appropriate space, equipment, ventilation, quiet, and catering capacity?
• What is the most appropriate layout e.g long or round table(s)?

When

• When is the best date?
• What is the best time to start bearing in mind religious and/or cultural sensitivities?
• When should the meeting finish – so that some hospitality can be offered afterwards and breaks/interruptions factored in?

CHAIRING MEETINGS

The role of the ‘chair’ is to facilitate the meeting in such a way that the collective wisdom of those attending is tapped into so that the objectives of the meeting are met and the intended results are achieved. At the same time, the participants’ role is to prepare for, and engage constructively.

Being seen to be impartial, independent, a good listener, and someone who is not afraid to ask advice goes a long way to engendering the ‘trust’ so vital to being perceived as a good manager. Good ‘chairs’ demonstrate the following skills:

• Start with a statement that outlines the purpose of the meeting, and the maximum time you will allow the meeting to last (60-90 minutes). This sets the purposeful tone and style of the meeting (be careful with humour, though, as this is so often misinterpreted in multicultural settings).

• Establish do’s and don’ts such as “please mute your phones” as this encourages respectful behaviours.

• Ask if everyone is happy with the items on the agenda. Don’t get too hung up on this, though.

• Keep discussions focused on key issues (i.e stop digressions – interrupt if necessary). However, allow flexibility within agenda items for participants to express and develop closely-related issues and concerns (but watch the clock).

• Avoid talking too much and getting personally involved in discussions.

• Listen actively  i.e be aware of your body language, look your interlocutor in the eye, nod and grunt from time to time to demonstrate your interest – even if this is feigned.

• Encourage wide participation. Ask for information and opinions.

• Ask open-ended questions.

• Don’t be defensive and don’t take comments personally.

• Clarify and elaborate when requested or when needed.

• Test continually for consensus (“Do you all agree ?”).

• Summarize, re-formulate and record key points. Since this is easier said than done when chairing the meeting, arrange for a volunteer to record salient points on a flipchart or powerpoint slide as they arise; this helps the group stay focused, avoids repetition, and helps reach consensus.

• End the meeting having agreed when and where to meet next, and ask anyone with suggestions as to how the meetings could be more effective to see you privately afterwards.

POWERPOINT

Senior military commanders despair at the amount of time their junior officers spend preparing briefings using Microsoft’s ‘powerpoint’ software. They argue that the medium, with its ability to move all manner of colours, shapes and sizes around the slide often tends to obscure the message. They also argue that the simplicity with which complex intellectual constructs can be reduced to a series of two-dimensional bullet points and multiple map overlays obscures the superficiality of the purported strategic thinking.

Civil servants in the UN can be accused of the same thing. How often have I sat through a mind numbing presentation consisting of fifty slides or more, to wake from my reverie during the polite applause not knowing or understanding what it was that the presenter wanted me to go away knowing about. How often has some eminent public health doctor moved on the next epidemiological graph when I have hardly had time to digest what the lines and columns on the first one were telling me.

As with other aspects of the information technology revolution, our human brains have not yet caught up with the potential of the medium. We appear to have forgotten how empirical data and emotional information is processed inside our heads, and so bombard us with more information than we can possibly process.

US General Stanley A. McChrystal, who leads the US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown this PowerPoint slide in Kabul. The idea was to portray the complex interlinkings of US military strategy – and complex it certainly was. “When we understand that slide, we will have won the war,” he said, to widespread laughter.

“Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable,” he went on to say, concerned that bullet points tended to miss or understate the economic, political and ethnic dynamics of a scenario.

Others have spoken out against what they call “fuzzy” bullet points. For example, a bullet that says “Improve information management” says nothing about who should do the improving, how or indeed, why.

Admittedly, the swathes of interconnected lines on that slide looked more like a Jackson Pollock painting than any kind of useful presentation. But again, that’s down to the shortsightedness of whoever put it together. A little more thought beforehand would have saved him from going down that route – and the laughter of the audience. (With thanks to David Vickery)

Meanwhile, I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen someone work hard on an ambitious presentation, test it all out, copy it to a laptop, and then have it fail when presenting. The reason is usually that the the presentation has become huge and the laptop isn’t fast enough or doesn’t have enough memory to handle it.

When I was a junior account executive in an advertising agency long ago, I had to give a new business ‘pitch’ to a prospective client in front of my boss. In these pre-powerpoint  days, slides were biked round at 3 a.m for approval so there was little room for last minute changes. When the moment came, and the lights dimmed, I strode to the podium and pressed the switch to advance the slides which were nestling in their neat pre-rehearsed order. But I must have pressed the wrong button, because all that happened was that the carousel housing the slides sped into reverse and ejected the slides all over the floor. My boss was hissing rage at me as, together, we scooped them up. An age later, my glowering boss was buying me champagne. We had won the business !

You might think that the magic of ‘powerpoint’ has made a relic of such crassness. On the contrary. Just last week, I had to give a presentation to over 500 people at a conference in Bangkok entitled “Language Kills !’. With such a provocative title, the opening had to be powerful. It was. The slides showed alright on my laptop monitor but that all-too-familiar ‘no signal’ sign was all the audience could read on the vast screen behind me. Once we sorted out the technical glitches, I started again. But not only was the opening – me speaking in Russian – ruined, but somehow the slides had reset themselves to advance every fifteen seconds regardless of what I was saying.

To prevent this, make sure you know and/or do the following every time before presenting:

• Rehearse.

• Makes sure the animations are set as you wanted i.e ‘advance on click’ (never use the ‘auto-advance’ function as presentations usually don’t go according to plan)

• Cntrl+F7 blanks the main screen while you can still see the slide on the monitor. Press it again and both go blank. Press it a third time, and the slide will show on both the monitor and the main screen. There can be a few seconds’ lag, so wait a bit before pressing the key again.

• Do not prop a book against the projector lens when you want to blank the main screen, especially a plastic covered book. There are over 150 people in Haiti who will tell you what happens when a plastic book cover explodes into flames just as the Coordinator is making his key point !

MULTI-LINGUAL MEETINGS

The success and quality of your meetings rely on everyone being given the space to contribute their views and information without fearing the consequence of anything they might say and without making them look stupid in front of their peers.

Conducting meetings entirely in either the relevant international language or the local language reduces effectiveness as it excludes key stakeholders. There are four options for interpretation:

1.     Whispering: Useful when only one or two people require interpretation, but it is distracting.

2.     Liaison: The interpreter translates a few sentences at a time. This is effective in short meetings when every word has to be understood, but becomes tedious and more than doubles the length of the meeting.

3.     Consecutive: The interpreter listens to a longer exchange of information, takes notes, and then delivers a summary. This method is probably the most useful as it captures key points but it risks losing some of the required detail.

4.     Simultaneous: Requires a radio microphone for the interpreter and headsets for the listeners. Obligatory in larger or more formal multi-national meetings, but requires technology, high levels of technical translation skill, and a pool of interpreters who can rotate (every half hour or so).

The method I have found to be the most effective and the most efficient is to chair the meeting and make presentations in the international language while simultaneously projecting a summarised version in the local language on a screen dedicated solely to that use (i.e in the opposite corner to the main screen being used). This version then becomes the basis for the meeting notes that you will circulate after the meeting.

What follows is the text from a presentation I gave in Bangkok at the ‘Language and MDG’ conference in November 2010:

It is important to recognise that improving accountability is a process that starts with the capacity to listen and respond to those affected.

People will respond in different ways to an emergency and some will be more resilient than others, providing ample opportunity to start the process of consultation. Emergencies personnel can and should nurture people’s capacity to overcome adversity by listening, providing clear and accurate information and opportunities for people to shape the responses and to feed back on actions taken.

Like individual jet-packs and flying cars, the idea of actually seeing the person you were talking to on the phone seemed a somewhat futuristic concept that was always just over the horizon, but would never actually happen in our lifetimes.

Well, thanks to ‘Skype’ and other similar voice-over-internet-protocol applications, that future is now well and truly upon us and it’s called “video-conferencing”.  Any manager needing to justify why they have to fly half way round the world to hold a two hour face-to-face meeting or attend a conference the title for which is so complicated that it needs to be read three times before understanding what it’s about, will need to learn new methods of business communication and familiarize themselves with its darker arts.

The trouble is that while ‘Moore’s Law’ – the ‘law’ that supposes the impact of technological innovation rises exponentially – continues to hold good, the digital revolution remains out of synch with the our prehensile ability to adapt our fumbling human behavior fast enough to keep up.

Even high definition TV monitors mean that we squint blankly across stuffy meeting rooms trying to discern who from the room full of people on the screen opposite is actually talking. Current video-conferencing technology also means that person-to-person conversations ensure we rarely look at each other eye to eye.

Because the camera on a laptop is at the top of the screen, actually looking directly at your colleague’s ugly mug on screen means he or she perceives you to be looking down. “When someone doesn’t look us in the eye, the brain deduces this as someone being less likeable, less confident, and less honest,” says Dr Tom Lewis, a practicing psychiatrist. This is problematic when trying to forge relationships over distance. “Even though intellectually we know that this is simply a technological quirk, deep down in or brains it’s hard to overcome feelings of suspicion when someone doesn’t look you straight in the eye.”

It gets worse. All we usually see on screen in one-to-one conversations is the head and shoulders of a semi-distracted person looking down, quite often typing while they’re supposedly listening to you. This lack of social interaction and feedback from body language cues off-screen makes it difficult for us to ‘trust’ the person with whom we’re supposedly having an interactive dialogue. Because of these little seemingly insignificant details, it is not unusual to come away from a group or one-to-one video-conference feeling vaguely disquieted without really understanding why. Psychology is why.

WORKSHOP FACILITATION

Workshops are used to analyse problems, develop plans together, learn new skills, swap experiences, change behaviour, and build teams. Good facilitation skills maximise the benefits of running workshops. A facilitator’s job is to “make it easy”; a role which therefore involves:

• Being objective and neutral
• Ensuring clarity and structure
• Managing time
• Focusing on outcomes
• Ensuring relevance of discussions
• Summarising and clarifying key points for learning and understanding
• Recording actions are agreed, recorded, and allocated
• Keeping the event flowing by managing the pace, suggesting breaks and allowing time for informal discussion
• Listening and observing to ensure everyone contributes
• Creating a relaxed atmosphere by use of ‘ice breakers’ and ‘energisers’
• Encouraging generation of creative ideas and individual thinking through ‘the no question too stupid’ principle
• Ensuring ‘parked’ (difficult) issues are not ignored

In preparing for a workshop, the following needs to be considered:

Focus on the intended outcome:

• What is to be gained by gathering people into one room?
• Would a webinar achieve the same outcome?
• Who is it aimed at?
• Have the objectives been agreed by the key stakeholders?

Possible Constraints:

• How much time is needed to practice the skills being imparted as opposed to being lectured to?
• Is the benefit worth the cost?
• Is the event a valuable use of executive time?
• Which location and layout will enable maximum participation?
• What style of learning are participants used to?
• How to ensure active participation across different cultural and language barriers?

Administration to make sure everything goes smoothly:

• Venue: Ensure the right room is available; that there are enough breakout rooms (each with flipcharts, paper, pens, tape and VIP-cards); registration
• Food and Accommodation: Coffee & Tea; lunch; transport to and from hotels
• Equipment: microphones (and spares); powerpoint projector(s) and screen; briefing packs; name tags
• Interpretation and Translation: simultaneous translation
• Facilitators and Speakers: invitations; transport; accommodation; payment; format and design; content; equipment and resources
• Materials: printing and collation of handouts (plus folder); registration of participants; evaluation questionnaires

Activities to maximise participation and outcome:

• Group work: mixing sizes, groups and tasks to stimulate wider ‘out-of-the-box’ thinking
• Multi media: overcomes language and cultural barriers
• Open-ended questions (why, what, how) to encourage exchange of experiences
• Simulation exercises: people learn best by doing
• Action planning: define actions to be followed up after the workshop

[1] Cluster participants request the webmaster (Cluster Information Manager) to join the Partner List. The beauty of this method is that individuals can de-select themselves at any time.