CASE
(Career Acquisition Skills Enhancement)

Topic: Running A Successful Meeting

Description:  As you will be given more responsibilities, you will find yourself in the position of running meetings for the purpose of gathering information, planning work, or implementing new procedures. Unfortunately, many meetings go astray because the meeting organizer unintentionally allows the introduction of peripheral discussion (better known as BS) not pertinent to the meeting’s goal. There are certain techniques to master if one is to run a meeting effectively. By following one of the suggested formats below, you will witness for yourself the quick degradation of a meeting and also develop some techniques for regaining control of the meeting and its objectives.
 

Approach:  The S-PAVe formats below will give you hands-on experience in dealing with running a successful meeting. This will be especially useful now as you have meetings to plan branch activities. Therefore, you can use your Branch as test case in the formats below and actually qualify for IEEE financial support while you have actual meetings. HOW ABOUT THAT!!!

Recording of an IEEE Student Branch Meeting
When you have a regular meeting, have it recorded (visually and/or orally) without prior knowledge of the officers who are running the meeting. Afterwards, have S-PAVe participants review the recording and document the time wasted by peripheral and trivial side discussions. Also, record if all the objectives of a meeting were met. Review with meeting participants the findings and record them. Then, document procedures for future officers on how to conduct a successful meeting. You may want to do this 3-4 times to get enough branch members to be able to participate. A typical time frame for this format is 4-6 weeks..

Mock Meeting
This is similar to the above, except you pick a topic and have branch members participate in small groups, about 6-10 people. Although it is called mock, the meeting objective should be such as to add benefit to your Branch. Some good topics to discuss is how to make your Branch more active, what activities members want to participate in, planning a S-PAC, etc. After all, it is good to have IEEE members other than officers be involved in your Branch. You should give them something relevant to the growth of your Branch so as not to arouse suspicion, and to make them act as naturally as possible. Again it may take 3-4 separate meetings to get everyone involved. Then go through the same steps as above in reviewing with participants what went wrong in the meeting

“How to Run a Successful Meeting”  Workshop
This workshop should be a full day event. A facilitator would be invited by the student branch to teach and have students participate in group sessions in being able to understand and implement the techniques for running a successful meeting.

Intended Outcome:  The goal for students in any one of the above workshops is to make the student aware of how easily meetings go astray, and develop techniques for maintaining control over a meeting.