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I saw the term ‘Power Meeting’ on a billboard, and had to laugh. If I remember correctly, it was for a cable Internet company advertising their IT services, but anyway…

I really can’t stand meetings. Especially when they are the long, drawn out kind that leave you wishing for a either bathroom break or a stiff drink at the end. Frankly, meetings are an art form. Both in organizing them, conducting them, and following up on them.

Don’t Waste Your Employee’s Time

First and foremost, don’t waste someone’s time. They won’t appreciate it, and chances are they aren’t going to be offering anything at the meeting anyway. So you are basically paying them for being unproductive.

Have A Focused Set Of Objectives

Make sure you have an outline going in of things that need to be discussed. Don’t spring new information on someone either. Email the meeting agenda out to everyone, that way people can prepare accordingly. The better prepared everyone is, the more you will get out of your meeting.

Adding the ‘Power’ to the Normal Meeting:

Here are some things that you need to come to grips with before venturing into the conference room. Once you come up with your answers, email them to everyone who will be attending the meeting.

• Why are we here?
• What are the main discussion points?
• What do we need to understand?
• What do we want to leave with?
• What’s in it for me? For us?
• What isn’t expected?
• How are discussion points going to be followed up?

Rescheduling, Recurring, and Exiting

When I was at Pepsi, we used to have 1.5 to 2 hour sales meetings every Tuesday; and they were definitely painful. The last thing any of us wanted to do at 6 AM was listen to our bosses for 2 hours, talking about something that could have been communicated just as well through email. In fact, most of the stuff we talked about was sent through email, but the meetings were designed to ‘reinforce it.’

In fact, I am of the accord that meetings over 30 minutes aren’t worth the time. For a meeting to stretch over the half hour mark, the objectives are terribly unfocused. Chances are the discussion points weren’t really necessary, or people weren’t given enough information prior to the meeting to prepare. That lack of preparation then led to the ‘baffle them with bullshit’ line of thinking, and so on.

There is one exception to this thirty minute rule though. That is in launching new businesses or coming together on some new product / process.

Usually, when you are starting something new, you are bringing together divisions, firms, people, and resources that aren’t usually used to working together. So the meetings are as much a feeling out process as they are a tool for productivity. They are essential to the new business’ development though.

In either case, it is essential to have some sort of follow up plan after the meeting. This can be carried out through meeting notes, email, assigning tasks, and so on. There might even be a follow up meeting with a couple people.

Power Meetings

The point of power meetings is to focus on a few key topics, extract the required information, and move on.

If everyone was in agreement from the beginning, meetings wouldn’t be necessary. Business would just be this nice, cohesive unit the functions regardless of any situation.

But as Henry Ford said, “If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.” And that is the function or power meetings.