Plan and Conduct Effective Meetings

Plan and Conduct Effective Meetings – Barbara Streibel

Meetings take up a large part of most managers’ working lives, yet many of them are poorly planned, run too long and fail to produce results.

Plan and Conduct Effective Meetings: 24 Steps to Generate Meaningful Results, by Barbara J. Streibel, part of the Briefcase Books series from McGraw-Hill, offers a practical, step-by-step guide to making meetings worth everyone’s time. Streibel, a consultant with extensive experience in facilitation and quality improvement, shows how to plan, lead and follow up on meetings so that they achieve clear outcomes.

The book covers the full meeting process: deciding whether a meeting is needed at all, defining its purpose and desired results, preparing an agenda, choosing participants, and setting up the room. It then explains how to facilitate discussion, keep the group focused, encourage participation, manage conflict and difficult behavior, make decisions and record action items. Finally, it addresses the important follow-up that turns decisions into results, and how to evaluate and continually improve meetings.

In the Briefcase Books format, the material is presented in short sections with checklists, examples, tips and warnings, making it easy to find and apply the most useful ideas quickly.

Plan and Conduct Effective Meetings is an excellent resource for managers, team leaders, project managers and anyone responsible for running meetings who wants to save time, improve collaboration and get better results.