Tips For Productive Meetings

The Art Of Meeting is an article from the Chronicle’s Run Your Campus column, by Russell Powell. It says, “Too often, it seems, we turn to meetings as the dull, reflexive, institutional strategy for tackling any issue or problem. Meetings give the appearance, if not always the reality, of something getting done. As a result, on some campuses there are times when it seems as if all people do is shuffle from one meeting to the next, yet still feel as if they haven't accomplished anything at the end of the day.” They offer some dos and don'ts to improve your investment on time spent in a room conversing with your colleagues in an academic setting.

Meeting Snark, a post written on the Chronicle’s Lesboprof Blog in response to The Art Of Meeting, contends that the was a solid primer on how to run meetings, but ignores many of the lessons this prof has learned over the years about really managing faculty, staff, and students in meetings. She offer her snarky comments on Powell’s article, “in essence, offering my own down and dirty, how-to guide for meetings that don’t piss people off or make them want to scream at the top of their lungs or cry.”

Prof Hacker’s How To Handle “Disruptive Colleagues” In Meetings offers 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,”  and gives tips for changing the culture of meetings in the future. From the same blog, the post Myers-Briggs: or how to learn to get along looks at the Myers-Briggs system for understanding personality traits, which can be helpful in understanding and working through the conflicts at meetings.

How about What not to say at a department meeting? If you’re in your first job or sitting in on a meeting as a graduate student, here is some advice for that. And Meeting Expectations, an essay on Inside Higher Ed, reviews the book Meeting Wise: Making the Most of Collaborative Time for Educators. Scheduling: Using Doodle to find the best time for a committee meeting from the ProfHacker 101 series covers the digital tools that simplify and automate the task of selecting an ideal time for meetings.