Meeting Management Tools & Techniques

The 15 Meeting Management Tools in the “Meeting Management” PowerPoint below will give you the tools you need to make your meetings more efficient, shorter, and more effective.

The “Meeting Management” PowerPoint also:

• Defines the role of a Team Leader and Team Member
• Provides the basics of meeting facilitation
• Gives tips to make your virtual meetings (remote meetings) better
• Provides 4 tools for giving feedback to a team

When a recurring meeting isn’t going well, it’s often because the team members don’t understand their role in the meeting. It’s up to the team leader to ensure that they understand that they are expected to participate, express their opinions, take on action items, and complete action items.

Sometimes a meeting doesn’t run well because the meeting leader doesn’t understand all that it entails to make a meeting run smoothly.

Common Mistakes Leaders Make in Running Meetings

The most common mistakes leaders make when leading recurring meetings are:

• Not:
  • Defining the Ground Rules for the meeting
  • Ensuring team members understand their role in the meeting
  • Creating and using meeting agendas
  • Planning a meeting with outcomes and/or products
  • Using meeting minutes to document actions and decisions
  • Holding team members accountable to complete their action items
  • Using effective decision-making tools
• Creating a “tell meeting” instead of a “working meeting”
• Allowing the meeting to go off-topic without careful consideration of whether it is the best use of time
• Allowing evaluation and criticism during brainstorming

The Biggest Mistake Leaders Make in Running Meetings

The biggest mistake that Leaders make in running meetings is not intervening in bad meeting behaviors:

• Non-participation
• Dominating
• Not paying attention
• Side conversations

Meeting Management Tools Provided

The meeting management tools that are covered in our “15 Meeting Management Tools” PowerPoint include:

• Meeting Agendas
• Minutes
• Parking Lot / Hold Bin
• Ground Rules
• Brainstorming Tools
• Decision-Making
  • Consensus
    • Fist to Five
  • Multi-voting
  • Solution Analysis
    • Prioritization Matrix
    • Pros and Cons
    • Benefits and Concerns
    • Evaluative Questions
  • Adaptive Decision-making

We suggest you review all of the tools, select some tools to implement, then implement one to two meeting management tools per month so you don’t overwhelm yourself or your team.

Meeting Management Evaluation & Feedback Tools

• Ground Rules Feedback
• Plus/Delta
• Team Effectiveness Survey
• Team Communication Map

Additional Resources on Meeting Management

For additional information on some of the tools and techniques we’ve presented, take a look at our 11 Tips for Running Effective Meetings blog post.

Also, we have a post on how to deal with bad meeting behaviors and Donna Schilder was interviewed on the “Coaching for Leaders” podcast on Five Steps to a Better Meeting,

Running Effective ELT Meetings

Need to make your Executive Leadership Team Meetings more efficient? We offer specific guidance for running  Executive Leadership Team Meetings (ELT) because creating effective ELT meetings requires specific strategies from a CEO and/or President.