If your meeting looks like this you’re probably doing it wrong 🤨

Run Timely Meetings

How to Run Successful Meetings — Part 4/4

Stop having meetings for the sake of meetings. Instead, schedule meetings with a frequency and length of time that makes sense for your team.

And then be accountable for it.

Meetings that are too long or are too often are time wasters. Period.

A multi-hour meeting is only appropriate if you have multiple hours of discussion-worthy information. Regular occurring meetings are only appropriate if they match your team’s momentum, ensuring everyone continues forward with the same velocity.

To create timely meetings that are successful for your team, keep the following key points in mind.

Schedule meetings for a specified block of time.

Then everyone knows how long they are expected to be there.

Create an agenda of what needs to be discussed and send it out before the meeting.

Then everyone will be aware of what topics will be the focus.

Start on time and be accountable to the meeting agenda.

Then everyone else can focus on ideas, solutions and how to achieve your team’s goals.

End the meeting when the meeting is meant to end.

That part is critical and worth mentioning twice.

End the meeting when the meeting is meant to end.

Do not drag things out. Do not keep people longer than intended. Do not waste your team’s time.

If you ran out of time, it is because of one (or more) of the following:

1. The meeting time frame was too short
2. The agenda was too ambitious
3. There was no accountability to the agenda or timeframe

Running successful meetings takes practice. It is a delicate balance of understanding your team’s dynamics, what you are aiming to achieve and how much time is available.

The timelier your meetings become, the more productive they will be. Succeed in that, and there is no limit to what your team can achieve.

TidyHQ is a membership platform built from the frustration of being on various committees and seeing how memberships are handled. There are now 12,000 administrators in over 40 countries using TidyHQ.com to run smarter community organisations. 🚀