How to Lead a Meeting: 7 Tips

If your wondering how to lead a meeting, it may very well be because leading a meeting is not always very easy. People are notorious for disliking meetings, skipping them and not paying attention during them. Here's what you can do in order to lead a productive meeting!

Instructions

1. Let people know about the meeting well ahead of time, so that they can keep their schedules clear. Additionally, remind people the day before the meeting via email. Finally, an announcement on the intercom fifteen minutes before the meeting is helpful. This minimizes people forgetting about the meeting or skipping out on it.

2. To lead a meeting, be sure to start on time. This shows respect to the people who showed up on time. Acknowledge latecomers with a nod, if at all. No mention needs to be made of lateness to the meeting during the meeting.

3. Make sure that you have all of your technology lined up ahead of time and in working order. Nothing is more boring for attendees than to have to watch you fiddle around with the link to your laptop for fifteen minutes.

4. People who lead effective, productive meetings have an agenda. Keep it as short as possible, and stick to it. Email the agenda in advance so that people can be thinking about it. At the meeting, if someone strays from the agenda, say, "Let's think about putting that concern on the agenda for our next meeting."

5. Make sure the purpose of your meeting is very clear. The agenda should help with this, but you need to clarify further. Is your purpose to solve a problem, discuss options, conduct training? Make sure that everyone knows exactly why they are present.

6. Remember that people learn in different ways. Use a variety of media--visual, auditory, even kinesthetic to convey your points.

7. At the end of the meeting, ask for people to write down any additional ideas that they had relating to the topic, and leave them in a stack on their way out. Finally, after the meeting is over, give each attendee a hardcopy of the minutes or send them via email.

Tips & Warnings

• If the meeting is going to be longer than half an hour, consider putting some chocolates on the tables for attendees to enjoy.

• Avoid getting off-topic. This is one of the number one reasons that people feel meetings are a waste of time.