Coordinating Work
How Successful Agencies Facilitate and Manage Their Meetings

Meetings are the most labor intensive, hence the most expensive way, for people in any organization to communicate with one another. They often do serve a purpose and are worth the price when they are more effective than other communication channel available for achieving an objective. Most professional and technical people feel that a majority of meetings they attend are a waste of time and money.

The purpose of this workshop is to teach people in NGOs how to make wise choices about when to hold meetings and to give them a variety of techniques and practices that will allow them to run efficient, effective meetings.


What's Covered

1. Reliable guidelines for deciding when to call a meeting
   
   
2. Kinds of meetings and alternative meeting formats
   
   
3. How to “target” a meeting by focusing on its key objectives
   
   
4. How to prepare for a meeting, set it up and get it started on time
   
   
5. How to conduct a meeting which sticks to its agenda and accomplishes its stated objectives; participants learn how to use published “Meeting Rules” that have grown out of the Team Building movement
   
   
6. How to bring a meeting to closure, agree on assignments growing out of the meeting and make arrangements for distributing minutes
   
   
7. How to maintain maximum participation that ensures commitment and follow-up to agreements
   
   
8. Recognizing when a meeting becomes dysfunctional, analyzing quickly what has gone wrong and taking corrective action to get it back on track
   
   
9. Dealing effectively with twelve different types of problem participants
   
   
10. Some quick tips on how to improve a meeting leader’s facilitation skills
    
    
11. Some quick tips on how to become a better, contributing meeting participant
    
    

1. They take charge of the meetings they lead and apply many of the organizing principles taught in this course
   
   
2. They are far less likely to call a meeting without thinking
   
   
3. They have far less tolerance for attending meetings that are poorly conceived and poorly led, and they tend to register their displeasure more vocally
   
   
4. They almost always publish and post the one-page “Meeting Rules” noted above
   
   
5. They show a mild tendency toward limiting discussion, a stronger tendency toward monitoring time and a very strong tendency to push toward decisions and actions
   
   
6. They show awareness of the importance of including all points of view, of gaining buy-in, and of generating the best possible solutions in those circumstances

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