Meeting....yes please

I think we have all been there, we have all been in a meetings where it feels like nothing is being accomplished. So how can we make our meetings better? Communications this week has been great, we have been able to talk about how our meetings can be more productive. So if and when we ever are able to manage a meeting then we can help it flow really well and get things taken care of. Meetings need a lot of structure, you have to be able to brainstorm your points and bring them back to a helpful solution. The one thing you don't want to do is to bring all these problems to the surface and leave them unsolved. In the perfect meeting there would be a facilitator someone that keeps everyone on task. At the beginning of the meeting there needs to be a meeting objective or goals that you would like to accomplish. During the next stages of the meeting there needs to be a lot of brainstorming and group input. After all of the ideas have been considered the facilitator needs to consider those ideas and help the members of the meeting to build a consensus or a solution to the problems discussed. Those steps all describe a good and successful meeting.

As I have been in the dental field for a while now I have been able to be in a few meetings myself. And looking back am able to pick out the good group meetings and of course the bad ones. During the good meetings the Dentist ordered us lunch and he would hand all of us an outline of what we will accomplish during this meeting. They were always very good meetings because we were all able to put in our input no one was singled out. We could express how we felt or how we think the problem could be addressed.

Meetings are a fact of life they will always happen; what a sad but very true statement. So lets hope all of our business managers take a good communications class; so they can learn all about the structure of meetings. Then maybe meetings can become more tolerable :)