Why is it important for a leader to have meeting management skills?
Meeting management skills are the ability to prepare, plan and organize to ensure a smooth meeting, and to convey the necessary information to the attendees.
Whether you're a leader or an employee, you've probably had to attend lengthy meetings but still get nowhere. Ineffective, off-topic meetings are the root cause of wasted organization time, budget, and resources. A common mentality among employees is that they are afraid to participate in hour-long "speeches" when they can completely use the time to do other more useful things.
Therefore, the meeting management skill of the host plays a very important role, decisive to the success - failure of the meeting. The leader's meeting organization and management skills will help:
Make sure everyone understands the information
Effective meeting management skills help leaders communicate their goals, strategies, and operational plans in a clear, focused way. Attendees will receive correct and sufficient information and understand their responsibilities. This saves the organization time and resources.
Agree on the opinions of the members
An organization is a diverse collection of individuals with different perspectives and perspectives. Therefore, in order to direct members to a common goal, an important factor that an effective meeting must achieve is the consensus of the parties. Meeting management skills will play the role of absorbing, synthesizing and processing different opinions to come to the most common conclusion.
Handling outstanding issues
In an organization, there are often many problems related to the operating system and the way it operates. Meetings are a time for people to get together and figure out how to solve problems. A skillful leader knows how to untie the knots right in the meeting.
Effective meeting management skills
Meeting planning skills
A successful meeting depends a lot on preparation. If prepared carefully and carefully, the meeting will be highly effective. To conduct the preparation stage, the organizer needs to have meeting planning skills, including the following:
Define meeting goals
As mentioned above, the meeting objective is an important element to clarify in the plan. A clear objective should indicate the reason for convening people, the content to be communicated, the problem to be solved.
Define the meeting context
- Time: It is necessary to determine the start and end time of the meeting and the time spent on the content in the meeting. The given time needs to be strictly adhered to ensure the schedule for the meeting.
- Venue: The location needs to be announced in advance to give attendees time to prepare. In addition, it is also necessary to consider the form of meeting organization (online or offline) so that it is convenient for attendees.
- Attendees: These are the subjects summoned to attend the meeting. Please note that only those who have authority to take responsibility for the contents of the meeting, those who are able to contribute ideas and who are directly affected by the decisions in the meeting to avoid waste power.
Prepare documents
To develop a meeting agenda, the organizer needs to clarify the following factors:
- The main content to be disseminated and the time allocated to the content
- Sequence of tasks to be solved
- Key issues that need to be discussed and discussed
- How to agree on the plan: collecting opinions/voting/…
Start meeting on time
An immutable rule when organizing meetings is to adhere to the time. No one wants their time to be wasted waiting. Starting a meeting on time shows that you are a disciplined, professional moderator. In addition, you also need to stick to the time frame for the content pieces to ensure the meeting ends on time.
Presentation skills
This is one of the most important skills in organizing and running meetings. A good moderator is one who can lead a smooth meeting by being able to communicate issues clearly and unambiguously.
To get off to a good start, the host needs to appear confident, full of energy. This is a way to create a friendly atmosphere and build strong relationships with attendees right from the start.
During the meeting, the chairperson should do his best to avoid re-reading verbatim content in a rigid, stereotypical way. Summarize and restate the core ideas and emphasize and dig deep into the central issues to make them easy for everyone to grasp.
In addition, body language is an effective "weapon" to make your presentation more lively and create a connection with people. Use facial expressions, gestures, and posture to illustrate your ideas, and don't forget to observe the participants' expressions to make appropriate adjustments.
Communication skills
An effective meeting is when there is a two-way interaction between the parties. To encourage members to exchange in the meeting, listening skills and asking questions are essential. Moderators need to focus on recording discussion and feedback from attendees to capture the main ideas and thinking to analyze information and ask in-depth questions if necessary.
Please note that you need to listen, receive ideas in a respectful way, on the basis of learning and development to show respect to the attendees. When discussing, you need to keep a positive attitude, avoid falling into confrontational situations.
Attendee coordination skills
To organize and run a meeting professionally, the operator needs to establish order by defining the roles of the attendees. Divide specific functions for members and coordinate them to perform tasks so that the meeting goes smoothly. There are many different roles in meetings such as: meeting secretary, logistics, delegate, listener, etc.
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