Effective Meeting Training

What is Effective Meetings Training?

Your meetings must be productive.

During your business meetings, in order to make good progress, you need your people to communicate well.
In order for your meetings to be productive, they must be well designed and well managed. The people attending them must be well prepared and well-motivated.

The question is this: How do you create meetings that are well designed, well managed, well prepared and held in the correct frame of mind?

The purpose of this course is to answer that question.

Effective Meetings Training

The high cost of meetings

If you are going to have a meeting, then make sure that the value derived from the meeting outweighs the cost of the meeting.

This course sets out the method by which you may avoid the pitfalls of bad meetings and enjoy the benefits of good meetings.

Effective Meetings Training Course Content

The course covered the following material

The high cost of meetings

1. The cost of the meeting is very high. Therefore the value of the meeting must be even higher.
2. Don't hold a 2k meeting for a 1k decision
3. What are the three practical alternatives to meetings?

The five qualities of productive meetings

In order for your meetings to be more productive, they should conform to the following five key principles

1. Clear Purpose

There must be a definite purpose to the meeting - Too many meetings drift on without purpose.

2. Accurate Language

The language must be focused and accurate. Not too much ambiguity, digression or vagueness.

3. Planned Approach

The meeting should have an agenda, a definite structure.

4. Rational conflict management and decision methods.

The meeting will often be held in order to make some kind of decision, or to analyse a difficult situation, therefore, the meeting may create disagreements and some conflicts. Such Decisions, analysis and conflicts need to be discussed and aired rationally, not emotionally: With logic not with upset of anger.

5. Positive atmosphere

To be most valuable, the meeting must be held in the spirit of cooperation: not antagonism.

The role of the chairperson

The chair person is a member of the meeting who directs and coordinates the activities of the delegates.

The agenda

The agenda is a written document that states the purpose of the meeting. It gives the meeting a structure.

The minutes / notes

The minutes of the meeting are the written notes (or recordings) of the main essentials of the meeting.

The delegates

The delegates are those people who attend the meeting. They come in various types:

• The railroader
  The railroader is the person who tries to dominate the meeting by pushing his ideas on the others without proper thought.
• The joker
  The joker misuses humour and detracts rather than adds value to the meeting.
• The digresser
  The digresser is the person who cannot keep his mind on the issue at hand and talks for too long about non-related or trivial issues.
• The cynic
  The cynic is the person who criticises all ideas without having any positive or practical ideas of his own to offer in their place.
• The 'broken record'
  The person who is obsessive over one issue: The delegate who cannot stop from thinking and talking about only one thing.

Make the decision

There is a need to make decisions

1. Don't procrastinate unnecessarily on making the decisions
2. Don't be tempted to endlessly delay making the decision on the grounds that you do not yet have perfect knowledge
3. You need to make a decision even in the face of incomplete and uncertain knowledge

Decision matrix methods

The main types of decision matrix methods:

1. Yes or No? Decisions
2. Which one, What kind? Decisions
3. What is the priority order? Decisions

Three skills of proper analysis.

How to keeping the conversation on track as you analyse the definition of terms, the problems, causes, solutions, implications and the possible countermeasures.

1. The need to define key terms
2. Problem cause solution analysis
3. Problem implication countermeasure analysis

The importance of taking good notes

1. In the meeting take good written notes.
2. Mental notes. (Memory training).
3. Make up your written notes.
4. Make up your action plans.
5. Review your notes. Don't ignore them.

Meeting skills. A Practice Exercise.

Let us hold a meeting in order to come to definite conclusions.
Let us see how well you do.
Discussion and questions

Summary and Action Plan

Price for open training course

• Full day of quality training
• Tea, coffee and cakes
• Lunch
• Full colour course notes
• Written action plan
• Certificate
• Additional training material by means of monthly updates
• Access to the Post Course Portal

Plus 3 months free telephone coaching

To answer any on-going questions, you will also receive email and telephone support from your trainer after you have attended the course. Whilst you are implementing what you have learned we will be there to help you if you need us for advice, guidance and coaching.

After the course, how can you to keep the training-momentum going?

We understand that it is important to keep the momentum of the training going, in the weeks after the course. The ideas and methods that you learnt during the course need to be implemented, not just for the two weeks after the course, but for all time!

In order to make that happen, we will give you continued, on-going support after the training course has finished. The support comes in the form of the Post Course Portal.

The Post Course Portal is a web page that contains a review of all the course material, plus the following:

• Newsletters containing training blogs and articles, which will provide you with ongoing training and good ideas, whenever you need them.
• Fun questionnaires that are designed to tease out your strengths and weaknesses and then give you ideas as to how you might improve your performance.
• Decision matrices that will allow you to make decisions and prioritise tasks into the correct order.
• Summary diagrams and mind maps from the course.
• Conflict scripts that give you examples of how the conflict method can be used, in real life situations.
• Free eBook the effective leader manager.

Price for in house training course

In House Course: from £1,850 +VAT per day (international training price varies) for up to 20 delegates

Please call us on +44 020 3856 3008 to discuss your requirements for the in house training course.

If you want to know more about any Management Training Course or their suitability for you or a colleague call us on +44 020 3856 3008.