Meetings, Meetings, Bloody Meetings! Part 4
Let the participants decide what they want to talk about.
So, we discussed the misconception that you should avoid meeting, we got the role of the chairperson out of the way and decided that we should invite all interested participants, the more the merrier!
Let’s finish this series with discussing the use or misuse of the agenda.
Badvice 4: Establish an agenda upfront.
The benefit of an agenda established before the meeting is largely overestimated. Often items on the agenda are not of interest for all the participants and reversely participants like to see other items discussed that are not on the agenda. These items are often discussed at the end of the meeting, causing the meeting to take longer.
This can cause a disconnect of participants during the discussion of the items that they are not interested in, waiting for the items that they like to discuss (causing others to disconnect if they are not interested in those). Or worse, they are waiting the whole meeting to be able to discuss their topics at the end. Not a very engaging meeting, is it?
So here is the advice:
Let the participants decide on the agenda items.
Ask at the start of the meeting (or during the days preceding the meeting) what the items are that the participants would like to see on the agenda. You can be sure that they will get the items that they are interested in on the agenda.
Good practice is to establish a common goal for the meeting before you ask participants to decide on the agenda items. That way they can decide if they like to submit items for this meeting.
You as leader of the project have a right to put items on the agenda as well. But if none of the participants feels that that item is of interest to them, perhaps you should reconsider it or bring it up in another meeting. At least you can get some useful feedback.
If items on the agenda are of interest to a subgroup of the participants, create breakout groups and let the participants themselves decide on the group they would like to contribute too. During a plenary session, everybody can be brought up to date with the results of the items discussed in the breakout groups.
That’s it for this series of advices to run a meeting. Looking forward to see if you have comments!
