Effective Meeting Management Can Make Your Career

by Paul J. Kostek

Meetings are an essential component of most engineers’ workday. It seems that some meetings are so satisfying that time flies by, while others drag on forever and simply take otherwise productive time away. What's the difference between a good meeting and a bad one? The answer lies in planning and control.

The Ingredients of a Good, Productive Meeting

Planning

When you are leading a meeting, you should plan it well. Start by asking yourself why you are calling a meeting in the first place. Do you have a specific purpose or goal in mind? For example, will this be a general staff meeting? Do you want to conduct a peer review of a particular design? If you don’t have a solid reason for taking people away from their work, you probably don’t need a meeting in the first place.

Develop an Agenda

Develop an agenda that centers around your reason for scheduling the meeting. List specific topics your group should be prepared to address. Then collect the materials you will need to support the meeting and distribute them in advance, so your attendees can prepare before they arrive.

Also, will this be a one-time meeting or one in a series of ongoing gatherings? Identify the meeting as such on your agenda. For ongoing meetings, provide meeting summaries whenever possible. Future meetings should include time for reviewing action items.

Decide Who Should Attend

Be sure you invite the right people to the meeting. Consider your meeting goals when putting your attendee list together, keeping in mind that if decisions need to be made, you should keep your group small. If you are not sure whom to invite, ask your manager or colleagues to help you identify the right people.

In addition, if your meeting will include customers or other off-site representatives, make arrangements for the visitors to access your facility and send them the agenda and meeting materials in advance, so they will be prepared to actively participate in the meeting.

Manage Time and Stay On Task

Managing a professional meeting equates to managing time: you need to start promptly and end on time. To accomplish this, manage your agenda and stay on the topic. Assign one person to record meeting minutes and action items. Review the action items before you adjourn, so everyone knows what needs to be done, by whom, and by when. If you need to schedule a follow-up meeting, do it while everyone is still together, and then be sure to distribute the summary and action items well before the follow-up meeting.

A well-planned and well-executed meeting reflects positively on your ability to organize and lead an activity. You’ll get a positive response from colleagues and leaders when you run meetings that have a start, middle and end, and that produce results. We all spend too much time at non-productive meetings. Make sure yours have a positive impact.

Paul Kostek is a principal at Air Direct Solutions, a provider of systems engineering services, and 2003 chair of the American Association of Engineering Societies (AAES). He has served as IEEE-USA President and as Region 6 PACE Coordinator.