[Leadership] Chapter 7: Leading Productive Management Meeting

Leadership Communication

Chapter 7

The leaders need to be able to plan and conduct effective, productive meetings. Doing so requires leadership communication skills and is important in setting the precedent for the rest of the organization. To avoid creating a negative atmosphere around meetings in the company, we need avoid the seven deadly sins of meeting.
1. People don’t take meeting seriously
2. Meetings are too long
3. People wander off the topic
4. Nothing happens once the meeting ends
5. People don’t tell the truth
6. Meetings are always missing important information
7. Meetings never get better
Communication purpose and strategy should come first in planning meetings, as in all communication situations. We need to define a clear purpose and analyze your audience to determine whether a meeting is the best forum for what we want to accomplish. The care that people give to defining the purpose and objectives will determine the success of the meeting. We need to write out the purposes and objectives very specifically: then, to start the meeting, tell the audience our intentions.
The agenda should follow directly from the objectives and end products and contain the information regarding the topic. In determining the agenda topics and the meeting tasks, we need to consider the time it will take to cover each topic or more important, to accomplish each objective then add et least 5 minutes to each topic to allow for transition.
The attendees are should be the ones who can contribute to achieving the objectives. The selected attendees will usually include the decision makers, the budget holder, those who must take action on the decision, those with expert knowledge affecting the decision, and representation from those affected by the decision. To the differences arising from national, regional, and functional cultures, we should encounter differences caused by personality.