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Book details
  • Genre:BUSINESS & ECONOMICS
  • SubGenre:Management
  • Language:English
  • Pages:112
  • eBook ISBN:9781623097837

Meeting for Results Tool Kit

Make Your Meetings Work

by Richard M. Lent

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Overview
Meeting for Results Tool Kit provides a different approach to running effective meetings because it: • Is written for leaders whose focus is on holding meetings to get work done and not on facilitation. • Provides 12 clear choices and 31 supporting tools for planning, conducting and achieving results from meetings. • Helps structure a naturally effective meeting instead of relying on rules or norms for guiding meeting behavior. • Serves as a reference tool or job aid in planning and running a meeting. • Helps leaders run effective board meetings, team meetings or staff meetings—in a business, non-profit, or community setting. By applying even a few of the choices and tools presented in this book, you can make your very next meeting more effective.
Description
A Different Approach to More Effective Meetings Meeting for Results Tool Kit provides a different approach to running effective meetings because it: • Is written for leaders whose focus is on holding meetings to get work done and not on facilitation. • Provides 12 clear choices and 31 supporting tools for planning, conducting and achieving results from meetings. • Helps structure a naturally effective meeting instead of relying on rules or norms for guiding meeting behavior. • Serves as a reference tool or job aid in planning and running a meeting. • Helps leaders run effective board meetings, team meetings or staff meetings—in a business, non-profit, or community setting. What Makes this Different Approach Possible? Much current advice on meetings is based on practices and assumptions about how to control behavior. We are asked to maintain order (e.g., “Robert’s Rules”), or to behave a certain way (e.g., “meeting norms”). However, such guidance is hard to follow, particularly when you want productive engagement in difficult discussions. Recently, various practitioners have developed ways to hold effective meetings with 50, 100 or more people. In such large groups, they could not “facilitate” behaviors of individual participants. Instead, they developed various structures that made it easier for people to talk together productively. Such structures enabled participants to “self-manage” the work, let everyone be heard, arrive at effective decisions and do so all within a set amount of time. Thousands of successful large group meetings have employed such structural approaches. Based on his experience with running large group meetings, Rick Lent began to adopt selected structural techniques and apply them to “regular” everyday meetings. In particular, he focused on techniques that could be used by leaders anywhere without a facilitator or extensive training. This Tool Kit distills what he has learned into 12 choices and 31 supporting tools that can help leaders run all kinds of meetings every day. Here are just some of the meeting challenges leaders have brought to Rick: • Jane struggled to keep a team of 12 people focused and engaged in the work of the meeting. • Brian’s meetings were contentious, as several members always came down on different sides of an issue. • John’s meetings seemed to produce few lasting agreements. Decisions reached in one meeting got revisited again later. • Susan’s meetings ran overtime and still didn’t get to everything on the agenda. These and similar challenges can all be addressed by working with choices and tools in this book. For example, Jane’s challenge with a team of 12 people benefited from making specific choices in planning the meeting given the size of her group. She used a tool Rick calls the Principle of 8 which suggests that her group was too large to engage everyone in an effective whole group discussion at all times. Instead, she could employ various tools to make sure participants had opportunities to speak and be heard—while still using time efficiently. Among several options, she used the tools called 1-2-All and Go-Around to enable all to speak to the topic, in small groups as well as with the whole team and her meetings became much more successful. As a board president told Rick after adopting just a few of the ideas in this book, “Your suggestions, were very helpful and proved to be most effective with the board members. The attendees felt included throughout the meeting and left energized. I kind of marvel at how well the discussion went and so easily. The approach was really a “no-brainer,’ yet we’d never done anything like it before.” Rick has spent 25 years identifying effective meeting structures and applying them in his work facilitating large group meetings in businesses, non-profit organizations and communities. The Meeting for Results Tool Kit distills what he has learned into an easily applied set of choices and tools to help leaders get better results from their own meetings.
About the author
Rick Lent has spent the last 25 years identifying structures for more effective meetings and applying them in his work facilitating meetings around the world in business, non-profit organizations and communities. Among the organizations in which he has led significant meetings are: InterAction (multi-stakeholder pandemic preparedness), UNICEF (country-wide health crisis), Ashland (design-build contracting), ArchstoneSmith (organizational change), Logitech (vision and balanced score card plan), the WK Kellogg Foundation (strategy and vision), Johnson & Johnson (post-merger alignment), the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (NGO partnering), as well as civic, religious and nonprofit groups. Rick writes and presents on techniques for engaging organizations and communities in achieving better results. With co-authors Jim Van Patten and Tom Phair, he described a dramatic turn-around in “Creating a World Class Manufacturer in Record Time” (Bunker and Alban, The Handbook of Large Group Methods, Jossey Bass, 2006, pp 112-124). His article “Combining Future Search and Open Space to Address Special Situations” appeared in the March 2005 issue of the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science. With Nancy Aronson, he presented on “Future Search: Using the Wisdom of the Whole System” at the 2006 Pegasus Communications Systems Thinking in Action Conference. Prior to starting his own consulting business, Rick managed consulting and training organizations for Omega Performance Corporation, Digital Equipment Corporation and the University of Maryland. He received his Ph.D. from Syracuse University in Instructional Design, Development and Evaluation and continued his studies in organizational learning and development. Rick delivers workshops and presentations on how to employ a structural approach to better meetings. He coaches leaders on how to improve their meetings and he designs and facilitates meetings of all sizes in many settings. Rick shares his stories and perspective on meetings on his blog at www.meetingforresults.com/blog. You can reach him at rick@meetingforresults.com.