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Sometimes we need to be told what we already know in order to realize we have not been doing the right thing. That's what happened with me and meeting agendas... I did know about having start times on agendas and sharing them in advance, but the corporate culture of winging it and not having agendas won me over after a few years and I became "one of them" !

After several frustrating meetings with other managers, I just couldn't take it anymore and having recently listened to the effective meetings podcast, I started creating agendas for these meetings.

Everyone at first made fun of the agenda because it had a start time associated with each topic and the owner.. they would say "oh no, you've given John 10 minutes for this topic, that is too much!" or "Hey Bob, you're running over your alloted 5 minutes!"... yeah yeah.. they all laughed (and still do sometimes), but you know what? We ended the meeting on time. And we already had 3 other meetings that were also very productive AND ended on time if not before the alloted time. Before that, we would go 30 mins over and leave with a feeling of not having accomplished anything.

Thanks Manager Tools for bringing me back to "effective manager world"! :)

Daniel

rwwh's picture
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Nice!

People always make fun of me during the meeting, but I do hear positive sounds when a 2 day meeting ends a few minutes early....

BJ_Marshall's picture
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I can take being laughed as a cost of being more effective and having people notice it.

Well done!

BJ

RichRuh's picture
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They'll stop joking about it around the time they start using agendas too. :)

Nice job!

--Rich