Meeting Management

A consultant who was running a daily meeting for 20 employees at an insurance company noticed that he had two ramblers taking his meetings off track. Solution? He brought chocolates into the meeting ... and trained the ramblers to stick to the agenda.

Nowadays, executives more often are meeting virtually, through instant messaging, video chat and other tools. Here's how to organize a virtual meeting, and prepare participants to get the most out of the session.

Nothing conveys urgency and efficiency like being on your feet during a daily meeting. Stanford Business School professor Bob Sutton observed this as he was co-writing the management book Hard Facts, along with Jeff Pfeffer.

You won't find many people who love meetings. That might be because attendees often feel like meetings are a waste of time. Turn your meeting minutes into an action plan.

Taking minutes wasn’t getting any easier for Terri Michaels, even after years of practice. “I had become wordy, and the minutes were sometimes eight pages. Each new director or company wanted them done differently,” she says. Finally, she enrolled in a workshop, and things changed. Now she uses these 10 best practices:

You’re taking minutes in a meeting when the conversation suddenly goes off topic. Or two attendees begin to argue. To what extent should you capture the conversation? Joan Burge, founder and CEO of Office Dynamics, offers these tips for turning meeting conversations into a valuable road map—even when the conversation is difficult to track.

Keep your bosses happy, your meetings on track and bring more value to your role as an admin with these tips on meeting management.

The monthly department meeting is next week, and you've already heard from four people who want to appear on the agenda. You expect a few more to chime in. It's your job to create an agenda that affords adequate time for each item, as well as to make sure the meeting runs smoothly and ends on time. Your best approach? Annette Marquis, co-owner of TRIAD Consulting, recommends building an adjustable meeting-agenda template in Excel.

When the meeting participants are mostly VIPs, scheduling can be a hairy process, says executive assistant Trisha Heil. Currently, she offers attendees a basic date-filled chart, so they can narrow down the choices to a mutually convenient time and date. But what do other admins do?

“I hate taking minutes. What do I write down? How do I know what’s important?” Streamline your minute-taking by recording notes as bullet points. Distill any conversation down to its essentials.