Josh Anstey’s Blog

There is nothing worse than a meeting with no momentum and participation, or a meeting where certain people are not given an opportunity to participate.

Here are 5 tips to encourage participation in meetings:

1. Monitor your own level of contribution – often as entrepreneurs we can get over-excited and steal the show. Make sure you are not the only one participating as you don’t want to come across too dominant or pushy
2. Steer the momentum – it is great if everyone is so enthusiastic about the topic but make sure you control the meeting if they try to talk over each other. If this happens, quieten everyone down, and announce an order to go around the table and hear everyone’s opinion.
3. Encourage everyone to participate – this is your meeting and you’re responsibly that everyone participates in the meeting. If you see somebody sitting quietly in the corner, or not contributing, encourage them to participate. This can be easily done in a number of ways such as asking them if they have anything to contribute to this topic, what their opinion on the topic is, or suggesting to the meeting that you go around the room and get input from everyone
4. Be enthusiastic and supporting – it is important that you are lively and enthusiastic and that you support suggestions made. There are still positive ways of acknowledging ideas that may not be practical or useful without hurting or insulting people. Being enthusiastic and supporting will make people want to participate and contribute
5. Watch body language – this can give you a really good indication of how the meeting is going, and what the person’s thoughts are on the issue. If they are leaning forwards, this means there is a good chance they want to add something, and may not be able to say it. If this happens, actively engage them and ask for their input. On the other hand, if someone is sitting far back and has removed themselves from the conversation, try invite them back in and ask what they think about the topic.

These are 5 simple tips to encouraging participation in a meeting.

Related posts include:

• Preparing for meetings – who to invite
• Preparing for meetings – 7 important points to organising the agenda

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This entry was posted on Friday, November 9th, 2007 at 8:33 am and is filed under Business, Entrepreneur, Networking, Start-ups. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.