The dreaded meeting

Meetings are often the lifeblood of a volunteer organization. It allows management to disseminate information to the general membership in the quickest, most effective manner. It ensures that the information is discussed and understood and it allows for the management to motivate the volunteer to "buy in".

The problems with meetings is that they are frequently the cholesterol in the lifeblood of a volunteer organization. Many times they are unnecessary gatherings that are poorly attended, poorly defined, or poorly run which means that more meetings are usually scheduled to try again to achieve the original goal of the meeting.

There are several ways to avoid this:

1) The most important question the leadership can ask prior to a meeting is, "Do we really have anything to talk about?" It is vital, however, that the leadership ask this "out-loud" because there may be a burning interest that some of the members need to bring before the collective body and that should not be overlooked. There are many times though that the leadership may find that the answer from everybody is a resounding NO and they can either not schedule a meeting or cancel an already scheduled meeting. This would make everyone happy and probably make for more productive, better attended meetings in the future.

2) Once the need for a meeting is established, the next thing to ask is, "What do we need to talk about?" The answer to this provides an agenda. To make meetings most effective, the planned agenda should be distributed to all members in advance to allow for additions to avoid surprises that will cause disruption. This allows everyone to be "on the same page" when they arrive for the meeting. It gives the leadership a general idea of how much time to allot to each subject and will help keep the meeting moving along.

3) The agenda should become the outline for the meeting which should ideally be wrapped up in an hour. Any issue that deserves more discussion than can be completed in an hour should be considered for a special meeting to allow for discussion on that topic alone. The leader of the meeting is responsible for keeping the discussion on topic and not allowing for wide-ranging discussions of topics, viewpoints, and opinions that have nothing to do with the original agenda item. In addition, the leader is responsible for the "parliamentary procedure" of the meeting. It would be advisable for anyone running a meeting to aquaint themselves with some sort of parliamentary procedure. My suggestion is The Standard Code of Parliamentary Procedure by Alice Sturgis. It is much simpler to use than Robert's Rules of Order and allows for much quicker meetings without extended parliamentary tricks.

These three steps can easily make an organizations meetings become more effective and better attended. People are anxious to stay informed and involved, but they will stop being interested if the monthly meeting is just a practice in spending an hour discussing gossip and achieving nothing.