Essay
Question 1
What are the essential components of a successful meeting?
Meetings are a part of any business whether small or big. It takes time to plan and run meetings in order to accomplish necessary goals. In order to be considered successful, any meeting should have several essential components, i.e. a meeting should:
have the objectives of the meeting / gathering clearly defined,
have only related team members present,
be organized the right way to keep people focused and willing to work effectively or willing to produce good ideas,
be oriented to get the best possible outcomes from the meeting,
be limited in time,
be held in accordance with the plan or the agenda in order none gets distracted from the discussion of really important issues, etc.
When should another method be used instead of a meeting?
Depending on the target audience, resources to be used, information to be shared, one may chose written method of communication instead. It would help to minimize the cost of a meeting. Among other alternative methods of communication are ‘phone calls, conference calls, memos/letters, postal mail, teleconferencing, and listserves’ (Rebori, 2016).
What are the costs of a meeting?
The real meeting cost expenses may vary from travel expenses to productivity costs. So, if you do not want to make a meeting a waste of time, it is better to learn to summarize.
Question 2
Have you ever facilitated a meeting?
Personally I have once facilitated a meeting. To be honest, I experienced some difficulty with keeping people on track. I had the goals defined in my head but failed to make my colleagues aware of the agenda. Thus, I learned that being a facilitator is not enough just to get people together.
How important is a facilitator to any meeting?
A facilitator is very important to any meeting. In other words, to be effective a meeting should better be facilitated. As I have mentioned earlier the facilitator should keep in mind that it is not enough to inform people when and where the meeting is going to take place. It is up to the person who leads the meeting to get the most from each participant's presence to reach the desired outcome.
What have you learned from observing how others led meeting?
Having observed others to lead meetings I learned that to organize a productive, valuable and engaging meeting is quite a task. I also learned that it is very important to manage problem behavior.
It is usually of great use to apply modern technologies to organize and held the meeting. They serve to save a lot of time and also help to book meeting rooms, print the agenda list and visitor badges on the spot, organize the catering, etc. The facilitator should also remember that long meetings usually tend to result in the feeling of boredom and total ineffectiveness of team members.
Question 3
Discuss the worst meeting that you ever had. Provide three reasons why the meeting was poorly operated.
One of the worst meetings I attended was that bad because of the participants’ behavior as some of them started to conflict with others what made the rest of the team bored. And it is a well-known fact that ‘if the crowd manages the meeting, there is no meeting, only a gathering that either disintegrates or turns into a mob’ (Shepstone, 2016). The leader poorly operated the meeting for three reasons as he:
was not able to control the conflicting audience,
ignored feeling of boredom,
pretended not to notice the negativity of atmosphere and tried to follow the agenda which helped him to postpone the conflict and to focus on avoiding tension.
What you might have done to reverse the issues?
So, to sum it all up, in order to make that exact meeting an effective one, I would recommend the facilitator to:
try to stay as simple and clear as possible (Peddi, 2016),
be focused and structured,
do not forget about your sense of humor, etc.
References
Peddi, A., (2016). Effective Meeting: Not only Efficient. Retrieved from https://www.academia.edu/11646281/Effective_Meeting_Not_only_efficient
Rebori, M.K., (2016). How to organize and run effective meetings. Retrieved from http://www.unce.unr.edu/publications/files/cd/other/fs9729.pdf
Shepstone, Th.J., (2016). Meeting Management – Someone’s Got to Do It. Retrieved from http://www.shepstone.net/MeetingManagement.pdf
