💾 Archived View for gmi.noulin.net › mobileNews › 5320.gmi captured on 2021-12-05 at 23:47:19. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-03)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Harvard Business Review Staff
March 18, 2015
When setting up a meeting, the people you invite are just as important as what
you need to get done. Including too many people or too few can be a waste
of time for everyone involved. The following excerpt from the book Running
Meetings will help you decide who should be in the room to make your meeting
most effective.
It may be easy to default to inviting a crowd of people to a meeting that
way, you don t really have to identify the most critical participants, you ll
avoid any ruffled feathers, you ll have everyone involved on hand for a
decision, and you won t have to repeat your communications separately
afterward. Or maybe your tendency is to want to keep things small: You may be
tempted to invite just a small group of people whose opinions you most value.
But for a meeting to be useful, you have to have the right people and only
the right people in the room. With too many attendees, you may have trouble
focusing everyone s time and attention and accomplishing anything; with too
few, you might not have the right decision makers or information providers in
the room.
As you plan your attendee list, consider who will help you to accomplish your
meeting s goal and those who will be most affected by its outcome. Most likely
this is a combination of people who will offer a variety of perspectives. Take
the time to methodically list the individuals in each of these categories to
make sure you include the right people:
The key decision makers for the issues involved
The ones with information and knowledge about the topics under discussion
People who have a commitment to or a stake in the issues
Those who need to know about the information you have to report in order to do
their jobs
Anyone who will be required to implement any decisions made
Feel free to consult with other stakeholders to make sure you ve made the right
list. Often another key stakeholder can remind you of a perspective you forgot
to bring into the room.
Just because someone s name is on your list, however, doesn t mean he or she
must be at the meeting. How many people should you actually invite? There are
no hard and fast rules, but in principle, a small meeting is best to actually
decide or accomplish something; a medium-sized meeting is ideal for
brainstorming; and for communicating and rallying, you can go large. Some
people use what s known as the 8-18-1800 rule as a rough guideline:
If you have to solve a problem or make a decision, invite no more than 8
people. If you have more participants, you may receive so much conflicting input
that it s difficult to deal with the problem or make the decision at hand.
If you want to brainstorm, then you can go as high as 18 people.
If the purpose of the meeting is for you to provide updates, invite however
many people need to receive the updates. However, if everyone attending the
meeting will be providing updates, limit the number of participants to no more
than 18.
If the purpose of the meeting is for you to rally the troops, go for 1,800 or
more!
If you decide not to invite individuals you listed as likely to be affected by
the meeting s outcome, have a plan to communicate the substance of the meeting
to them afterward.