Over at the productivity and business blog Productivity501 they've put together a list of tips to make meetings more efficient. Our favorite? Argumentation is central to a good meeting. They elaborate:
Use meetings to argue: This sounds bad, but really, this is what meetings are effective for. Meetings let you get people together and work through differences in person. You can pit various ideas against each other and come up with the best solutions. If you don't have any arguing going on in your meetings, then you are probably having meetings for the wrong reasons.
You have to learn to argue fair. You are discussing ideas, not personally attacking people. It may take a bit to get a team to open up to the point where they can passionately express their views, but that is what you need for meetings to really become productive.
One common problem is having someone at a meeting that is so important that no one will disagree with him/her. If no one is going to disagree, you might as well just let that person make all the decisions. I had a graphic designer working for me once who would never disagree with me when we were having meetings. I finally asked her about this. She said she didn't want to argue with her boss. I explained that I was paying her to disagree with me! If I didn't want her opinion, I wouldn't have hired her in the first place.
If you're not hashing out ideas, arguing your position for some new change, product, project, or procedure, the meeting is essentially just a report that you could read at your leisure. Wouldn't you rather skim over an email with meeting notes in it and skip the Powerpoint presentation all together? Check out the full list at the link below for more great meeting-saving tips.
9 Tips for Efficient Meetings [Producity501]"
