Meetings, meetings, meetings. Clarity and commitment?

Meetings are an essential part of business life.  We HAVE to communicate and few, even the geeks amongst us, feel you can do it all by email and social media.  But they can easily become wasteful and ineffective.

MD2MD speaker Jeff Grout recently suggested to members that business leaders use a simple checklist of questions at the end of every meeting to ensure there is clear common understanding between all members of the team. The four questions he suggested were really simple, but clearly focused:

• What have we agreed?
• Why have we agreed that?
• What are we going to communicate?
• How are we going to communicate that?

Maybe if all of us in leadership and management positions used those questions at the end of all our meetings, we’d avoid a few of the seemingly inevitable misunderstandings within our team.