HOLDING MEETINGS

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 536.

Much of any manger's time is taken up with meetings. Meetings are part of every manager's life. He should therefore know how to cope with them. He should know the techniques of communication in meetings.

It is sometimes suggested that when a manager can't think what to do, he holds a meeting. But meetings in themselves are not an end product. They are merely one of the many means of management communication. It may well be that a problem can be solved by a one-to-one discussion, face to face, or even by telephone.

Let us therefore define a meeting, in the management sense, as the gathering of a group of people for a controlled discussion, with a specific purpose. It is often salutary to calculate the cost of a meeting. A simple meeting of a few people on middle-executive salaries can soon run into three-figure costs for wages alone. Do not, therefore, have unnecessary people sitting in at meetings and do ensure that all meetings are both efficient and effective.

The essential of effective and efficient meetings are as follows:

1. A purpose: there are two basic purposes for all meetings – problem-solving or idea-generating.
2. An agenda: without this essential piece of paper (or a list on a blackboard) any meeting will soon become out of control.
3. Participants: participants can be categorized in three types: the chairman; the secretary; and the other members. The people in each of these three categories have their own functions and duties.
4. A result: a result will itself be inadequate until it is recorded in the final essential …
5. A report: usually those much-maligned minutes.