Last week I gave an invited presentation on running organisational meetings at the annual meeting of chairs of NSW university academic boards in Canberra. The chair of one university said that she had herself videotaped running a board meeting and found that she swiveled too much and tapped her fingers on a table too much. I praised her for using video and told the group that Olympians are a group of people who commonly use videotape to enhance their performance. Another chair said that he used surveymonkey or something similar to collect anonymous feedback on his performance running board meetings. I complimented him also for using a sophisticated assessment method. The information I provided at the meeting pertained to research published this year in Current Psychology by some students and me. We observed 60 meeting leaders run organisational meetings and then obtained anonymous ratings of the meetings by attendees. These ratings covered satisfaction with the meeting and productivity of the meeting. We observed 19 leader behaviors that (a) were recommended by experts and (b) would tend to help attendees achieve important goals on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. We found that the number of the 19 behaviours shown by the leaders correlated significantly with ratings of both satisfaction and productivity. The most highly correlated leader behaviours were:

1. arriving before the start of the meeting

2. speaking succinctly

3. moving the meeting along

4. encouraging participation

5. encouraging decision making

6. paraphrasing a comment made by someone at the meeting

7. smiling more than once

8. saying something positive about the future of the organization

9. summarizing the decisions made.

I became interested in this line of research as a result of suffering through some unpleasant and pointless meetings. I have also been in many well-run meetings. How well run are the organisational meetings you attend? What happened in the worst-run meeting you ever attended?

If you would like a copy of the article describing our research findings, please send me an email at jmalouff@une.edu.au.

John Malouff, PhD
Assoc Prof of Psychology
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