A friend of mine is the chief financial officer of a growing high-tech company in Arizona. He loves his company and he admires Bill X, his company’s boss, to whom he reports. But Bill X has one significant failing: He’s terrible at running meetings. His meetings are often “circular” (to use my friend’s expression), with no clear outcome. This drives my friend crazy.

In my view, there are 12 rules that, if Bill X obeys them, will always result in productive meetings. I’ve provided these rules to my friend. I hope they will be useful to you.

1. Don’t call a meeting if you don’t need one. Can you achieve the meeting’s goal by an exchange of emails?

2. In announcing your meeting, make clear its purpose and agenda and who will lead it, and make sure in advance that the leader knows how to lead. Good meetings require good leaders.

3. In your meeting announcement, invite only those participants who are absolutely necessary to achieve the meeting’s purpose, and never invite more than ten of them.

4. In your meeting announcement, ask all participants to prepare for the meeting. This will usually mean that your announcement must go out at least a day before the meeting.

5. In your meeting announcement, state clearly the starting and closing times for the meeting, and stick to these times rigidly.

6. When you’re starting the meeting, make clear that no one may talk at the meeting while anyone else is talking. No talking over.

7. Forbid any comments by participants during the meeting that are irrelevant to the meeting’s purpose.

8. Forbid PowerPoint presentations at the meeting except by skilled PowerPoint users using only a very few, very brief bullet points per PowerPoint page. Otherwise, you’ll waste time listening to endless PowerPoint readings.

9. If one or more meeting participants will join the meeting remotely by Zoom or by any similar online means, make certain well in advance that each of these participants knows how to join, has working audio and video, and has a properly focused computer camera. A huge amount of meeting time can be wasted fixing Zoom problems before the meeting even begins.

10. If possible, gather and distribute to the participants in advance all of the documents necessary for the meeting and ask them to read them. Don’t rely on Zoom screen sharing of documents unless you have to.

11. Politely order the participates to turn off their cell phones and laptops during the meeting.

12. Have someone keep good minutes of the meeting, and circulate the minutes and report of its results it soon after it ends.

How can we get the Bill X’s of this world to follow these rules?

John Cunningham is a lawyer licensed to practice law in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. He is of counsel to the law firm of McLane Middleton, P.A. Contact him at 856-7172 or lawjmc@comcast.net. His website is llc199a.com. For access to all of his Law in the Marketplace columns, visit concordmonitor.com.

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