The Department of Medicine hosted Beverly Brown today to speak about how to run meetings effectively. What I liked about her presentation was how she emphasized that meetings are part of work even though too often they get in the way of work.
With a little planning and structure, meetings can be effective in brainstorming ideas, making a decision, or sharing information. I will take away the idea of sending out minutes to the previous meeting with action items and people’s names highlighted. That way at the next meeting, members feel accountable for following through.
It’s also easy to forget to put the most urgent items on the top of the agenda. The more open-ended discussions can go at the end, where they are more likely to get truncated because of time limits. In perhaps the best suggestion, Dr. Brown asked, “What’s so magical about the one-hour meeting?” Making them 45 or 30 minutes will spur productivity.