"I'd like to start this meeting today with a few ground rules. I'm going to speak and you're going to listen. In the event you finish before I do, please don't raise your hand..."

How many meetings have you sat through where you would have been very grateful for the right to exercise that option? If you are like most people, the answer is too many.

Yet, the fact remains that every working day around the country people are reluctantly crowding into too hot or too cold conference rooms, coffee mug in one hand and the ubiquitous pen and pad in the other, and preparing themselves for yet another time-wasting exercise in futility...a meeting.

Admittedly that does sound a bit melodramatic. After all, meetings are the very loom businesses weave their futures upon - professionals sitting down face-to-face and generating solutions to challenges they haven't even thought of yet.

No, it's not the meeting in and of itself that is the robber baron of the sales-person's precious time and energy. It's the way we are still conducting meetings that has brought grownups to their knees at the mere utterance of the words, "We are having another meeting today to discuss...."

Take heart. There is hope and there are solutions for improving your meetings. After years of gathering feedback from managers, supervisors and the agents, some profoundly simple truths surfaced. After culling and stripping them down, it seems that there are five basic rules that, when followed consistently, will have even the most skeptical generation X'er looking forward to your next meeting.

RULE No. 1:

Stop having meetings unless you are certain that is what is called for. Too often we call a meeting without asking if the information to be communicated can best be communicated more effectively in another way. One reason we traditionally put people into the same room to come to decisions was that we lacked other forms of technology able to accomplish the tasks at hand without being joined together at the hip, so to speak.

With the dawn of e-mail, readily available faxes, teleconference centers, conference calls and telepathy (just wanted to see if you were still with me), the need for a meeting is greatly diminished. The person who "owns" the problem, in other words the person who called the meeting, can easily pose questions to the appropriate resources and share their input one to the other through that technology.

A note here about the attendees at a meeting or the resources: These are the folks that have to be at the meeting because their input is necessary to the solution(s). It is the job of the person calling the meeting to be certain he or she chooses those people carefully. People resent being at meetings that have no relevance for them and where they sit aimlessly waiting for the torture to end. If anyone asked them why they were there, they would probably tell them they had no idea. They just got the word to show up.

RULE NO. 2:

Shame on you if you call a meeting and there is anyone present who hasn't a clue why. It's the meeting caller who is responsible for creating the agenda for the meeting, well in advance of the actual meeting. Perhaps you are thinking, "Oh, not the old agenda routine. That's as tired as Robert's Rules." Well, guess what? You're right and this is one of those things that still packs a big punch with the meeting crowd. Surveys point to the fact that, when asked, people say they very much appreciate knowing what will be covered in the meeting, what time it will begin and end, and what input is expected from them.

The other advantage of an agenda is it allows people to add items, within a certain timeframe, and to be prepared to discuss items already appearing on the agenda. It's frustrating to be sitting in a meeting and suddenly have a topic surface that, had you known in advance was going to come up, would have allowed you to prepare to give your input.

The agendas of old were wordy and too lengthy for even the most studious person to read through. Don't make that mistake. Make your agenda short, sweet and noticeable. Here's an example of a format that I have found to be effective and actually read: