And I'm sure you can tell from the last time I was up here, I used my hands a lot. So I'm really kind of stuck when I have to stand here behind the podium. But I'm still using my hands as much as I can. Yes, this is running an effective meeting. I have, this is me. I am a musician. I'm a reader. Some people were really productive during COVID. I finished like 37 different puzzles. That was my mental breakthrough. And I have not developed any disclosures since this morning when I told you before. All right. How can we prepare for an effective meeting? That's going to be important. And what are some strategies that we can use to organize a meeting? And we're talking about, we're not talking about a day long or a multiple day long meeting. Because that's well out of the scope of this presentation. But some of the principles would still apply if you're doing more than just developing a business meeting. Which is what most of you will have to do as you move through your leadership career or in things that you want to do. So if you Google running an effective meeting, one of the first things that's going to come up is they tell you, do you really need to have a meeting? And that's the most important thing. I would say that that's really secondary. Because the first thing you really need to do is figure out the information that you're trying to present in the meeting. What are you trying to get across? What kind of things are going to be discussed in the meeting? Because then that can help you figure out. Can I do this just with an email? Am I just providing a piece of information to my staff or to the people I work with that can be done in an email? I don't have to have a meeting for everybody to be together. So you have to figure out what are your objectives and goals for pulling these people together. Is it going to be most effective in a meeting situation? If I plan on telling them that we're changing the entire structure of how we run the unit, that's probably, well, you may not want to do it face-to-face because you may not want the repercussions that occur, but it's probably going to be much better in a face-to-face presentation than just sending out a little email so that you can hide behind your computer and never have to talk to anybody. So you have to figure out what your objectives are. What kind of things do you want to get across to everybody there? Then you have to figure out, does it have to be face-to-face? If we've learned nothing else through COVID and with leadership and meetings, we know that there are a lot of things we don't have to necessarily do in a face-to-face meeting. It's much more fun to be around people that you can actually communicate with. If we're in a face-to-face meeting, I can look out there at all of you and I can see, yes, you're engaged, yes, you're looking, you're communicating with everybody else, as opposed to having a Zoom meeting where I can have my name on the screen while I'm doing 14 other things and I'm really not paying any attention to what's going on because I'm not really there. And someone mentioned earlier that, you know, when your meeting's over and that name still sits there and no one ever exits out, you know, okay, I know that you didn't pay any attention. But we know that Zoom meetings can be more effective. I know as a faculty member, we had much more participation in our Zoom meetings than we did in face-to-face meetings. People didn't have to come to campus. They could, if they're offsite, they could still participate in the meeting. If they were at home, they could participate in the meeting. So there is that option. So it's figuring out what's the best way that we can get the people together, we can make sure they're going to be engaged and they're going to be paying attention in order to get the information across, get the communication that we need with each other in this meeting. So when you're organizing a meeting, you also need to figure out who needs to be there. If I'm going to have a meeting about the financial situation of our unit or our department and I have nobody there who knows anything about the finances, why am I bothering to have a meeting? Because the person who's most important isn't sitting at the table. You really need to think about it. I'm one who uses football analogies all the time. You know, you would not have a football game without the quarterback. And since we're in San Francisco, I have to mention, you know, Purdy being here as a third string quarterback, now taking them to the divisional, I think we're at the divisional champion, no, we're still at a division game, whatever game we're at. You know, so you have to have that. My nephew plays soccer. He says the center middle fielder is the most important person on the team because they run everything that's happening out there. So you have to pull the most important people, at least invite them to the table. Make sure they're invited to the meeting. If they can't be there, there's probably no reason for us to have a meeting because that's the information that we need to get across, making sure that those people who can really provide good insights to the situation that we're talking about are present and can have time to discuss options that we have. Talking about, say, building a new building. If we're going to have meetings, having a new building that we're putting up. You know, who needs to be at the table to make sure that we meet all of the standards that have to be fit, who can think about all of the problems that might be there. I worked in a hospital. When it was built, you could not fit a wheelchair into the bathroom. So it's like, okay, who missed that one? You know, I have a hospital full of patients that I'm dealing with, but I can't get anybody into the bathroom with a wheelchair because it won't fit through the door. You know, so thinking about those things, people who are working with the day-to-day structural process of the unit, of the division, can be helpful in presenting different ideas or different problems that we haven't thought about. Then you need to develop your agenda. You have to have an agenda for your meeting, and if you want any type of feedback and you want people to attend the meeting, they need to have the agenda beforehand. You don't want to spring something on them and have them say, I want you to all give me feedback, talk about what's going on, what are your thoughts? You want to give them time to be able to look at that and to really think through their ideas of what this means. What might this mean for us going forward? What kind of problems might this present? You know, what are we not thinking about in how we're changing things around? So sending it out before, and not like 20 minutes beforehand. Give them a day or two to look at it, because other people might see that agenda and say, you know, I really need to make an effort to be there, because they're really going to be talking about something that is important to me. The other thing you want to do with your agenda is set a timeline, because you want the meeting to start and end on time. That's extremely important. You want to make sure that you limit the time for people to talk. And when you have a day-long meeting, you can build in times to make up for, okay, this person talked longer than their scheduled time, I can make it up here. If you're having a one or a two-hour meeting, you're very limited on being able to do that. So giving them a time limit is going to be extremely important. And then you have to have a timekeeper when you're there. So you have to have ground rules in place for the meetings that you're going to have, so that you want civil meetings, you want people to feel comfortable in bringing thoughts forward for being able to identify what might be a potential problem with ideas that are being brought forward, and you don't want them to feel uncomfortable about that. So these are some of the ground rules we have at meetings that we have in the College of Nursing. You want to be able to listen to all the ideas that are presented, because someone might come up with a good idea that you didn't think about. You want to make sure that you're acknowledging others. You want to respect other people, and you don't want to focus your dissent on the person, but maybe on the idea or the problem that's there. The other thing that happens in meetings, everybody needs to say they agree with the same thing. You know, you have 14 people that are all, I agree with everything that they said. And it's almost like they want to be heard, but you need to call the question. You're really wasting a lot of time if everybody is saying the same thing. So when the comments start to get repetitive, you need to be able to refocus the meeting and move on to the next topic. You know, recognizing that, yes, everybody has a good opinion, and if you have additional things you want to tell me, email that to me, or find me after the meeting can be very helpful. Again, challenging the idea, the issue that's at hand, not the person who's presenting it. That's really important. You want to make sure that people are speaking for themselves and they're not generalizing their comments. Because like we've heard earlier, I don't know what really somebody else is thinking. I can't really speak for somebody else in that meeting. You want to try to make sure that there's only one conversation going on at a time. And that can be really hard, particularly for all of us who have had Zoom meetings for so long, now we get back to in-person meetings with people I haven't seen for years, and we're all trying to catch up at the same time that we're having a meeting. So it's really difficult. But you also want people to engage. Making sure that they're engaging, and if you really want to get something out of the meeting or understand what's happening in that meeting, make sure that you are engaged with what's going on. Like I mentioned, you want to make sure that you start on time. People's time is important, particularly if they are coming to an in-person meeting. If I had to get up, I had to get ready, I had to, for me, feed my dogs, get them out, get them back in, get everything done, get in the car, and drive to wherever this meeting is, I don't want to be sitting around forever waiting for it to start. So start the meeting on time, stick to the agenda, and that can be important by having a timekeeper who can really say, okay, you need to wrap this up. And most of us, if you've had meetings with people in your department, you will know those people who tend to get very long-winded. And if you give them 10 minutes to speak, they will have slides prepared for a 35-minute talk. It's like, no. You have to be able to address them and say, okay, we need to summarize this. You have, we even have a timekeeper here saying, okay, you've got two minutes left. You know, wrap it up so that you can keep things on task because the next most important thing is to end on time. People don't want to be sitting around for a long period of time and the meeting continues to move on and on and on. So starting and ending on time, sticking to that agenda is extremely important. Having a little flexibility, if someone's going to come in and speak on a topic and they're unavailable right now, you know, we all work in a medical environment, things happen. Something happening on the unit, I might not be able to get there. Be able to move ahead in the meeting for a while. And then you can go back to whatever that person was going to present when they are able to get there. So at the end of your meeting, you want to be able to summarize it. So you want to leave at least five minutes at the end of your meeting to summarize what went on. What occurred, what did we talk about, did we make any decisions? So what were the decisions that we made going forward? Do we have an action plan? And when you develop your action plan from the meeting that you have, make sure you put a name to that action. Who is going to be responsible for doing that or for at least coordinating that action? Then somebody has a personal stake in making sure that that actually does get done. The last thing you can do is ask for feedback. Particularly if you are new to organizing meetings and running a meeting, ask the people who are there or ask some of the people there, particularly if you really trust people, that they're going to give you an honest answer. Ask them for feedback. How do you think this went? Do you think I could have done something better? How do you think I could have changed this to make it more effective? So that you can figure out how can I grow and how can I be better organized when I'm having additional meetings in the future? Because most of you, when you have meetings with your division or your unit or your staff, it's not going to be the one and only one you ever have. You're going to have them going forward. So you want to make sure that you're improving every time you go through this. So to summarize, all in all, have an agenda. Make sure that the agenda is presented to the participants or those you've invited beforehand so that they can look it over, so that they can be prepared in order to be actively involved in the meeting. Keep on time. Keep on task. And you may, again, have that good timekeeper who can help you do that. Summarize the meeting at the end so that people, everybody's on the same page of what we accomplished, decisions we've made, and what actions we plan to take on going forward. And then set up that plan. What are we going to do? What are our next steps? When do we need to meet again? Or I will email everyone next week for ideas that they can come together on this topic that we discussed. So you want to put all of that together so that you can keep people engaged, but not go overboard, and so that you're losing people with the meetings that you're having. And that, I think, is it.

meeting strategies

agenda

time management

summarization

follow-up actions