Meetings are important business and social activities. However, research suggests that meetings engulf as much as 60 per cent of the time we spend at work. Despite their necessity and the costs involved, many meetings are organized by individuals who have other full-time responsibilities and lack the formal training and experience to ensure their successful planning and execution. How to Manage Meetings provides much-needed guidance on how to get meetings right. Readers should be able to reap the rewards from appropriate preparation, maximizing participation, understanding group dynamics, effective chairing, and how to follow up effectively after a meeting has taken place. This fully revised second edition includes new content on electronic and virtual meetings, a new chapter on improving a group's thinking and additional guidance on how best to prepare for a meeting from the perspective of three key roles: Chair, Administrator and Participant.

What makes for a great meeting? As a leader, how can you keep discussions on point and productive? In How to Run a Meeting, Antony Jay argues that too many leaders fail to plan adequately for meetings. In this bestselling article, he defines the characteristics that contribute to success, from keeping formal minutes to acknowledging junior staff first. These guidelines will help you get demonstrably better results from every meeting you run. Since 1922, Harvard Business Review has been a leading source of breakthrough ideas in management practice. The Harvard Business Review Classics series now offers you the opportunity to make these seminal pieces a part of your permanent management library. Each highly readable volume contains a groundbreaking idea that continues to shape best practices and inspire countless managers around the world.

Preface -- Setting the meeting stage -- So many meetings and so much frustration -- Get rid of meetings? no, solve meetings through science -- Evidence-based strategies for leaders -- The image in the mirror is likely wrong -- Meet for 48 minutes -- Agendas are a hollow crutch -- The bigger, the badder -- Don't get too comfortable in that chair -- Deflate negative energy from the start -- No more talking! -- The folly of the remote call-in meeting -- Putting it all together -- Epilogue: trying to get ahead of the science' using science -- Tool: meeting quality self-assessment -- Tool: sample engagement survey and 360 feedback questions on meetings -- Tool: good meeting facilitation checklist -- Tool: huddle implementation checklist -- Tool: agenda template -- Tool: guide to taking good meeting minutes/notes -- Tool: expectations assessment -- Acknowledgments -- References -- Index

Run more productive meetings. Whether you're new to running meetings or a seasoned executive with no time to waste, leading effective (and even pleasant!) meetings is a must. Running Meetings guides you through the basics of: Crafting a useful agenda Inviting the right team members Making sure everyone's voice is heard while avoiding conflict Capturing decisions, ideas, and follow-up tasks Don't have much time? Get up to speed fast on the most essential business skills with HBR's 20-Minute Manager series. Whether you need a crash course or a brief refresher, each book in the series is a concise, practical primer that will help you brush up on a key management topic. Advice you can quickly read and apply, for ambitious professionals and aspiring executives—from the most trusted source in business.

Groups and teams are the backbone of most organizations. Employees come together to pool their efforts, join forces, develop creative ideas, and make decisions in one key social context: the workplace meeting. This volume presents novel perspectives and state-of-the art research insights into the management of team meetings in the workplace.

Have you just been asked to chair a meeting, or take the minutes, or set up a meeting agenda? Need some help? Would samples of an agenda or minutes be useful? What about some techniques for chairing a meeting or dealing with difficult people? Then this "How to ." book is for you. In it you will find: how to decide whether there should be meeting how to set up the agenda the importance of setting timeframes in the agenda-and sticking to them how to make sure that time is not wasted and the important items are covered how to chair the meeting how to stop time wasters and to make sure you spend the right time on the right topics how the minute taker can collect the right information during the meeting how to write the minutes how to get the best out of the participants how to deal with difficult people There are also: a checklist for the meeting chair agenda example and agenda template minutes example and minutes template a checklist for how to improve your meetings a checklist for getting the best out of people a checklist for the minute taker a checklist for dealing with disagreements, differences and conflict

A best-seller in its first edition, Making Meetings Work: Achieving High Quality Group Decisions, Second Edition covers everything you need to know about organizing engaging meetings, including preparing agendas, controlling what happens behind the scenes prior to and after meetings, and managing conflicting values and personalities. Through the Meeting Masters Research Project at the University of Michigan, author John E. Tropman observed and interviewed the nation′s most successful meeting experts to find out how to make meetings both stimulating and productive. Based on his findings, Tropman formulated seven principles and fourteen commandments for implementing dynamic meetings. This second edition has been extensively revised and expanded to include Family meetings and family group decision making Problems and solutions for board of directors meetings Community and civic meetings Volunteers and meetings Leadership in community decision making Making Meetings Work: Achieving High Quality Group Decisions, Second Edition provides simple, easily applied best practices for supervising or instigating meetings with decision accomplishment outcomes. Author John E. Tropman reveals goal oriented procedures that keep proposals moving towards quality group decision making and assure other participants look forward to attending your meetings. Written with humor and a deep understanding of the realities of business and political life, Making Meetings Work: Achieving High Quality Group Decisions, Second Edition is an extraordinary resource for anyone who leads, facilitates, or attends meetings.