Read This Before Your Next Meeting

ONE OF THE CONTRIBUTING FACTORS TO MY decision to leave full-time nonprofit organizational life was the amount of time I spent in meetings. Board meetings, staff meetings, committee meetings, community meetings....you name it (and you know it, I'm sure). A day at the office wasn't complete without one....or two....or....

Given the fact that nonprofits are all about people means that there's a ton of communication that must take place in order to nurture and maintain them, and service the constituents who need them. In the communication quiver is one arrow that gets readily used: the meeting.

Trying to contain meeting virus is a serious management tool. With so much written about it, it’s a wonder that many organizations still haven’t been able to master it very well or at all. Here’s one more bit of advice – by Harvard Business blogger Gina Trapini, Extreme Ways to Shorten and Reduce Meetings. Among her suggestions:

Start and end on time. Basic stuff, but it’s amazing how many meetings don’t start on time. And when they don't start on time, they almost always run over. Have you noticed that by the end of these late-starters there are but a handful of people? What's the point of that?
Meet standing up – a surefire way to keep meeting time to a minimum.
Post a countdown clock so everyone can see the time…and the time left to get through the agenda.
Keep agendas short. Ah, yes...that means weeding out all those reports of past events and putting the most critical stuff at the beginning of the meeting.

I like the idea of posting written meeting expectations in offices and meeting spaces (as in the photo above), and including it in board member and committee chair orientation packets. I think it's a great idea to go over meeting expectations with boards, staffs and committees, too. As your groups master the expectations, you may be able to raise the bar of expectations.

For those of you who are interested in what the rules say in the photo:

Before a meeting...

1. Clarify the purpose

2. Make sure you've got the right people and everyone is prepared

3. Prepare outcomes and agenda in advance

4. For problem-solving and decision-making prepare an assessment ahead of time and present your recommendation

5. Create a "strawman" in advance to give people a place to start from

During a meeting...

1. Start with a review of the outcomes and agenda

Clarify the decision-making process upfront

2. Share responsibility for keeping the meeting focused and on track -- anyone can call a "process check"

3. Document all key decisions and agreements

Keep a running list of issues

4. Solicit comments from those who haven't spoken much

After a meeting (or at the end of the meeting)....

1. Review key decisions/agreements to make sure everyone leaves with the same understanding

2. Assign next steps with due dates

Photo: Conference room wall from ginatrapani

Back in the Saddle

MY LAST POST WAS NOVEMBER 2012, A LIGHT YEAR AWAY it seems, that marked the beginning of a long push toward completing a manuscript on history museum leadership with my co-author, Joan Baldwin. We finally submitted 350+ pages to our editor at Rowman & Littlefield this week. If all goes well, we expect the book to be available in early 2014. It's taken us two years to get to this point, so six more months or so of revision and production don't seem too long to wait until we can hold the final product in our hands (and you can, too!). The project put a lot of things on hold, including this blog. I'm glad to be back writing about intentional leadership -- leading by design -- for nonprofit boards and staffs. Certainly, my thoughts are now informed by the forthcoming book, in which Joan and I posit that nonprofits need to focus resources on leadership, not just management. Most cultural nonprofits are at a crossroad, as is the sector in general, where nothing is qu

Change for Your Board in 2010: A Polling Update

WE'RE A DAY INTO MY LAST POLL (SEE RIGHT) AND the responses are clustering in two areas: 1) removing dead wood from the board and 2) using better/different tools to make decisions/evaluate performance. There are still six days left for your colleagues to cast their vote! In the meantime, those of you who are in need of tools for decision-making might want to check my posts on taking stock here , here and here .

Three Most Important Nonprofit Executive Director Soft Skills

If you were asked to narrow down the list of executive director qualifications to the three most important, which ones would you identify? Would the list consist of soft skills, hard skills, or some combination? Would your list be based on the great ED you are or one you've worked for, or would it be your wish list for the ED you haven't been fortunate yet to work for? This was an assignment in my recent online class in leadership and administration for the American Association for State and Local History . I asked the class to review three-five advertisements for museum directors and analyze what these listings intimated about the organization’s past experience, current focus and goals, and future aspirations. Then, I asked the class to identify what they consider to be the three most important qualifications they would look for in a director. (Okay, so there's more than three if you dissect my three big groups.) Soft skills outnumbered hard skills, although

Leading by Design

Search This Blog