Summary
This one-day program goes beyond rules and checklists to examine the predictable challenges that occur during meetings. Participants learn how to maximize the outcome of team meetings by planning effectively, matching their leadership style to the meeting function, handling difficult participants and situations and choosing the right decision-making techniques for different agenda items. Program participants also learn how to implement appropriate follow-up steps.

Time is always scarce. If teams are to extract every possible ounce of productivity from each moment of time, they need more than teamwork skills of trust and consensus. This program adds the critical and very practical skills required to get things done when team members meet together. 

Course Outcomes
In this workshop, your team leaders and members will go beyond rules and checklists to examine the predictable challenges that can make getting things done difficult in team meetings. They learn to apply the team development model in planning and preparing for meetings, leading and facilitating the actual working sessions, participating effectively, and following-up to ensure closure on decisions made and actions planned. Specifically, participants will learn more effective ways to:

• Plan meeting purpose, outcomes, and agenda;
• Match leadership style to meeting function;
• Handle difficult participants and situations;
• Choose decision-making techniques for specific agenda items;
• Be proactive meeting participants on the job; and
• Implement appropriate meeting follow-up.

In creating these outcomes, the workshop initiates an enormously powerful, self-perpetuating process: productive team meetings create more positive attitudes toward working together and toward meetings in particular. The more positive team attitudes and expectations, the more productive meetings become.

The context for this workshop is established with an opening exercise in which participants calculate the cost to the organization of a team meeting. The numbers are often surprising, and become more significant as participants consider the number of meetings they have participated in which produced little or no value!

The focus of this course is on building teams through the medium of meetings. It is organized around the team meeting model, a conceptual framework that includes a carefully sequenced series of activities: content overviews, written and video case studies, small-group activities, and on-the-job applications.