Love ’em or hate ’em, meetings are a fact of academic life. In a typical semester, most faculty participate in a variety of meetings, ranging from student thesis committees, departmental committees, college working groups, faculty senate meetings, or even campus or regional planning meetings. Here are some ideas and resources from the ProfHacker archives to make your next meeting just a little bit better.
How Do You Behave in a Meeting?
Complaining about meetings is a favorite academic pastime, but Jason’s salutary suggestions in Bad Meetings Are Your Fault remind us all that our individual actions contribute to the meeting culture in our departments or on our campuses. Although things like being on time and staying away from your smartphone during meetings might seem like obvious professional behaviors, many of us might be occasionally guilty of something on Jason’s list.
In Myers-Briggs or How to Learn to Get Along I wrote about how I’ve personally found the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to be a useful tool for learning about the different ways that people interact with each other, gather information, make decisions, and relate to structured authority. I’ve found that simply being aware of the different ways people approach these things helps me to be a more effective committee member and chair.
Committee and Department Meetings
Jason offers some advice to junior faculty about What Not to Say at a Department Meeting, especially remarks beginning with “when I was a graduate student at [Great University].”
In Handling Disruptive Colleagues in Meetings, Billie offered a list of typical faculty behaviors in meetings that might seem all-too-familiar, including “the committee member who never stops talking” and the one who always begins with “we tried that 30 years ago.” Just reading her list might help put your own committee experiences in perspective.
College and University Meetings
Jason discusses the particular challenges faced by university standing committees in Motivating Standing Committees, suggesting that interests and authority are important in getting the members of a standing committee to care about its work.
Jason also offers Four Ways to Improve Faculty Senate Meetings, largely by ensuring participants are prepared, parliamentary procedure is followed, and that the stakes for all involved are made clear.
Helpful Tools
Jason discusses the importance of organizing tasks and ideas that come up during a meeting and reviews minutes.io in Make Meetings More Useful. This web service aims to simplify the process of distributing an agenda, recording actions and planned outcomes, and clarifying individual responsibility for those actions.
George describes how he uses Doodle to Schedule Committee Meetings. Doodle lets you offer a few choices for meeting days and times to participants in a poll and collates their responses to make it easier to find the best time for a meeting.
What’s your favorite tip for improving meetings? let us know in the comments!
[Creative Commons licensed image by flickr user ricoeurian]
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