You can say something like, “ We have 5 more minutes allocated for this agenda item so let’s make it brief”. If someone starts rambling and goes on and on about something, kindly refer back to the agenda. Enforce the ground rules (when appropriate) You can also have a list of the ground rules on a flip chart or pin them up on a wall somewhere so that they are visible to everyone throughout the meeting. If you have new people attending the meeting, or if you are running the meeting for the first time, make sure you walk through each rule.

If you are running a recurring meeting where all the meeting participants know about the meeting rules, you can just quickly remind them that the rules apply and ask them if they agree to them. Share the ground rules and get buy-inįor the ground rules to be effective everybody needs to know about them and commit to them. The parking lot is for topics that are of interest, but that is not on the agenda and thus they need to be parked and the discussion continued at another time. Another important rule, especially if you tend to have a lot of “Ramblers” in your meetings, is to have a meeting “parking lot”. If you can stick to these two ground rules you have come a long way. The two most important rules to keep your meetings on track are to start and finish on time and to follow a pre-published agenda. You can read the ground rules that I follow for my meetings, in the blog article “Running Effective Meetings”. The foundation for keeping your meetings on track is to set ground rules. In this article, I wanted to give you a quick summary of what you can do to increase the likelihood of keeping your meetings on track.

There is a lot of management guidance on how to manage these destructive meeting behaviors Manager Tools provide a full podcast series with practical advice on how to manage each one of these meeting killers. Another very common type of meeting killer in today’s gadget-filled world is “The Multitasker”, the one who is constantly texting, surfing and doing email during the meeting. Anyone who has run meetings knows about these types of behaviors and how destructive they are to effective meetings. In May 2012 there was an article in the Wall Street Journal called, “Meet the Meeting Killers.” In the article the columnist described four types of people that ruin effective meetings “The Jokester”, “The Dominator”, “The Naysayer” and “The Rambler”. Business Productivity > Blog > How to keep your meetings on track? How to keep your meetings on track?

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