How to Get a Meeting Back on Track

Here are some tips to make sure a meeting starts off right and some suggestions of how to rescue one that has gone astray

by Liz Ryan

There is a lot of folklore about Microsoft (MSFT), but I hope this urban legend is true: They say that at Microsoft, at least in certain circles, you don't have to sit through boring meetings. You have to give the presenter 10 minutes. After that, you are free to go if you're bored or if the meeting isn't relevant to your work. Can you imagine how empowering it would be to stand up, smile, and waft out of the room when a meeting goes wrong? If all of us non-Microsofties had that much leeway (and weren't worried about looking bad, making someone else look bad, or hurting our teammates' feelings), we'd be out the door 10 minutes and 30 seconds after half our weekly meetings had begun.

Why is that meetings so frequently bore us to tears? It's because of the nature of conversation. Meetings, after all, are based on the notion that when people sit down together, they should talk, and talk they do. We start out with a goal in mind—let's say, developing a plan for the upcoming product launch—and end up going down ratholes, ranging from whether the company's logo colors ought to be re-examined to why the travel budget got squashed in the last month of the quarter. Conversation meanders. If you look forward to meetings as a way to shoot the breeze with your colleagues, this kind of meeting might be fine with you. But for people who have piles of work on their desks, stuffed inboxes to deal with, and managers breathing down their necks, ineffective meetings are a pox. Still, there is a way to get a meeting back in order.

Better, yet, you can help a meeting start off right. And you don't have to be the person who called the meeting, a manager, or anyone of particular importance to do that. You only have to raise your voice at the very beginning of the hour, and ask, "Can I get a couple of data points about this meeting?" Ask the organizer how long the meeting is scheduled to last, whether the meeting has a specific objective and if so, what that objective is. Ask whether there is a specific action item attached (not just "to discuss the upcoming reorganization") and whether the meeting is designed to elicit input, review, or refine an in-progress campaign or whether it was called simply to communicate a confirmed plan of action.

Different Meetings Require Different Strategies

If you're cautious or have been burned by meandering-meeting syndrome before, you can, of course, request this information before the meeting begins, via an e-mail message when you first receive the meeting invitation. You can and should decline to attend if the meeting's purpose is murky or its agenda unintelligible. These are bad signs that an hour of your time is about to be wasted.

The last question on your list is important. Brainstorming meetings are different from review-and-refine meetings and both of those types are different still from meetings designed simply to communicate a plan. Each of the three meeting types must be managed differently from the others, so it's critical to know what sort of room you're in before the conversation gets underway. In a brainstorming session, everyone is encouraged to submit ideas, and practical implementation is held off for a future conversation.

In a review-and-refine meeting, a specific proposal is brought to the table. If you're the organizer of a meeting like that, you must let people know that the moment has passed for big and radical new ideas. Your goal at this meeting is to identify any looming problems with the plan and work to surmount them. Meeting attendees can suggest minor changes and refinements to the program. If you invite people to a meeting to talk about any initiative—let's say, the introduction of your product line into a new market—and people come to the meeting only to learn that the big decisions have been made without their input, don't expect lots of enthusiasm for the fine-tuning exercise. But if you're dealing with the same group of people who conceived the original proposal and are game to put the finishing touches on it, you're good to go.

No Substitute for Face Time

The last flavor of meeting is the one where someone is simply announcing "how it's going to be" and answering questions about it. This is the type of meeting the HR folks schedule when there are big changes in the health-care plan or the annual performance review schedule. If you're planning a meeting like this, make sure people know the story: the meeting may be boring, but the cost for non-attendance is that you don't get the answers you may need.

I am definitely in the camp that believes there's no substitute for face-to-face communication. That being said, I'm in the ADHD camp too, and I'd rather have knitting needles stuck in my eyes than sit through a long-winded corporate team meeting. This is one situation where more process helps. Identifying why we're here, what we're going to get done, and how long it's going to take us are critical steps. After that, ensuring that everyone in the room knows the ground rules—whether our task is to generate ideas, refine them, or simply ingest them for later dissemination to our teammates—is the key.

So let's say you do all that, but 20 minutes into the meeting, there goes Stella down a rathole, sharing her story of getting stuck in the company parking lot with a non-functioning ID the day they changed the security codes without telling anyone. How do you, as a non-leader of the meeting, get people back on track? "How are we doing on our agenda?" is always a safe question.

A bit stronger is: "Is this something we should discuss offline?" Interpersonal relations on the team are the bees' knees, and bonding is a wonderful thing, but irrelevant conversation in a business meeting exacts a toll on everyone present. Better to tell Stella politely that she's meandering than to force 10 or 12 people to sit through her monologue in agony.

If you're not lucky enough to have the right to mosey when a meeting runs aground, do the next best thing and pull it back into the water. Somebody has to. It might as well be you.

Liz Ryan is an expert on the new-millennium workplace and a former Fortune 500 HR executive. She can be reached at liz@asklizryan.com.