Meetings: Productive + Efficient = Success
Guest User
“15% of an organization’s collective time is spent in meetings and most are unproductive. Executives consider that more than 67% of meetings to be failures.” (Dockweiler, 2015)
Use the early meetings this year to establish how each of your teams will ensure meetings are productive and efficient.
Establish Norms and Working Agreements for each team.
Norms are skills and behaviors normally modelled by the group such as “presuming positive intentions” and “balancing advocacy and inquiry.” Working Agreements are collaboratively established practices to be more productive, such as “start and end on time” and “get the most done in the least amount of time to the greatest satisfaction.”
Determine how the group will hold each other to these norms and working agreements.
If someone breaks a norm or working agreement, may anyone in the group address it?
Establish a process for continued work to improve meetings and group processes.
How and how often are norms and working agreements addressed and revisited? How often do we get feedback? How often do we set a goal or intention to work on group processes? As Garmston and Wellman write, “Any group that is too busy to reflect on process it too busy to improve.”
For more information on Norms and Working Agreements, see Garmston and Wellman’s The Adaptive School: A Sourcebook for Developing Collaborative Groups.