There are two types of meetings; the frequent internal meeting held at your organization for follow ups and updates and the big important meeting that involves stakeholders from outside of the organization and usually aims to discuss a new project idea and ways to collaborate or the results and recommendations of an ended project. It is safe to say that the first type is easier to prepare and hold than the second type.
Here are 6 tips to follow to organize a successful meeting:
1. Prepare down to the details
Carefully put on a meeting agenda based on the topics you’re going to discuss, time allocated for each person to speak, presentations, breaks and others. Make sure the room where you plan to hold the meeting is suitable and equipped. Do you need an internet connection and a projector? How’s the lighting and A/C?
2. Hold pre-meeting meetings
If you plan to have presentations and talking points discussed by individual participants, you should meet with those participants ahead of time to make sure that each one of them is prepared and that their requirements are met.
3. Summarize important information
When there are more than one person sharing confidential information at the meeting, it's your job to read through the documents ahead of time and summarize the salient points for the participants during the session.
4. Stick to the agenda
It is quite common in meetings that one or more participants will feel the urge to talk about something that is not part of the meeting’s agenda. Your job is to stop them nicely but firmly saying something along these lines: "Thank you for bringing up this issue. It's clearly important. But allow me to check with the rest of participants whether it's OK if we get back to it after we finish with the other items on our agenda."
5. Manage everyone’s time
Some participants will try to take more time than specified for them to talk. What should you do as the leader of the meeting? Wait until they take a breath, and then jump in. First summarize the point, so the person feels he's been heard. Then say, "You've brought up some important issues. Unfortunately we don’t have enough time to discuss it during this meeting but I would like to ask the committee if we can have it at the top of the topics to be discussed in our next meeting"
6.Reward hard work
When the purpose of a meeting is to do a post-game wrap-up of a project that has taken a lot of hard work, you need to reward and thank the participants. What you can do is to give out small thank-you gifts, such as mugs printed with a slogan or joke that will resonate with the team.
