Four Keys to Effective Communication Through Meetings

Think of effective communication as a function of abilities , motivation, and opportunity. Team meetings represent a major opportunity to have effective communication. While you probably want to keep your meetings friendly, you still need to keep them orderly. A disciplined approach to meetings does not have to be cold and formal, but it does require certain elements to be in place.

Clear Purpose and Agenda

At a minimum, the overall purpose of the meeting should be announced at the beginning of the meeting. Or, if desired, the purpose of each item on the agenda could be announced. Purposes might include sharing information, discussing information, soliciting options and input, making decisions, building better relations, and so on. Be very clear on the purpose and ask all members to act accordingly . Ideally, the agenda is provided to team members in advance or at least posted at the beginning of the meeting and includes some items solicited from the team prior to the meeting. The estimated time to be devoted to each item on the agenda should also be announced.

Clear Roles and Responsibilities

Each attendee should understand and fulfill his or her role and responsibilities.

• The chairperson convenes the meeting, keeps the team focused on the purpose and the agenda, and identifies who has the floor to speak.

• The recorder keeps the minutes for the meeting. It should be determined in advance whether to keep both an internal and external form of the minutes. At a minimum, the minutes must include all decisions made or announced at the meeting, but they can also include information regarding problems raised, options considered , data gathered, and so on. It may be wise not to share ideas generated during brainstorming sessions with people outside the team. The team must feel safe to consider all ideas but hold itself responsible for those ideas on which it makes decisions.

• Team members must commit to attending and contributing. Those charged with the responsibility, or having volunteered, to bring materials to the meeting must deliver.

• The facilitator, if one is designated by the team, focuses on the process more than on the content of the meeting. He or she has the responsibility to try to keep everyone involved and to intervene if a few dominate. The facilitator should be the friendly but firm enforcer of the team's ground rules.

• Ex-officio members of the team may attend as a source of information the team needs to resolve an issue. They may be members of management (or union leadership) attending to show their support for the team and to gain insight regarding the issues the team is addressing. They may simply be observers trying to learn what the team does well so that they can help their own teams in another part of the organization. Typically, the responsibility of ex-officio members is to provide voice, not vote. That is, they are there to provide information, observations, and questions for the team to consider, not to participate in the team's decision-making process.

Clear Ground Rules

Every team should have a clear set of ground rules regarding members' behavior at team meetings to encourage mutual respect and effective decision making. Often these rules are included in the team charter. Some common examples for personal behavior include "No personal attacks" and "Only one person is to speak at a time." Procedural rules could include "Meetings are to start and end on time" and "The chair will declare when the team is to engage in brainstorming and when it is to engage in debate." A separate section should be provided for the rules of brainstorming.

A special section on decision-making rules should be provided as well. This could include statements clarifying that the team is only to make recommendations and that management has the final decision. Or, that the team may make decisions on matters within stated boundaries and that those decisions must be made by consensusin which case there should be further rules regarding how the team is to verify whether a consensus is in fact reached. The team may use some form of majority rule in its decision making such as, "For a decision to be final, 80 percent of those in attendance must be in favor." (See chapter 6 for more help on decision making.)

Do not have ground rules that not all members are expected to follow. Agreement and enforcement of these rules partly determines whether your team concept is credible.

Evaluation and Feedback

Members must be given the opportunity to comment on the way team meetings are being conducted . There are several ways to do this: a written form can be provided to solicit anonymous feedback from team members; time can be allocated at the end of each meeting for members to comment on how they felt about the meeting; or an observer can be assigned to a team meeting and later tell members what he or she saw occurring. In all cases, the key is making sure that the feedback is listened to and used to improve future team meetings. I have found it very useful to have teams dedicate at least a meeting a yearand more in the early stages of a team's developmentto systematically address the problems associated with their meetings. (A problem-solving system proven to be a particularly helpful way to organize these sessions is provided in chapter 6.)