This information sheet looks at what chairing a meeting involves, and how to do it. There are some useful tips and advice to help improve and develop your chairing skills. Show
What makes a good chair?A good chair helps the meeting to run smoothly and efficiently. The person who chairs a meeting can sometimes be referred to as the ‘facilitator’. They will make sure that:
A good chair will also:
No one can do this without the cooperation and agreement of the whole meeting – the chairperson is not a miracle worker! Everyone can learn how to chair well; it just takes a bit of thought and practice. You will get more confident with experience. Try watching how other people chair meetings, and seeing what works and what doesn’t. Do you need a chairperson?Some groups don’t have a formal role of chair, or a named chairperson. However, even very small or informal meetings need some direction and organisation. You could decide to rotate this role. This has the advantage that it spreads the responsibility and gives everyone a chance to be involved with the running of the group. A potential disadvantage of rotating the chair is that no one takes responsibility for the role, or that the same person always ends up chairing without a proper agreement about this. If you do decide to have a rotating chair, work out collectively what is expected of them and agree from the end of each meeting who will chair the next one. This gives them the opportunity to think about the meeting and their role in it. Before the meetingTo chair a meeting well, you need to think about the meeting before you arrive at it. Ask yourself the following questions in advance of the meeting:
It isn’t the chair’s job to figure all this out on their own. Work together with the secretary and other committee members. Find out what people want to discuss, and think about how you can raise issues in a clear and informed way. AgendaAn agenda is simply a list of the things you want to discuss in your meeting. As well as helping you plan, it is a useful way of making sure you cover everything you need to at the meeting. A clear agenda, with timings, really helps when you are chairing. Timing is important to the success of the meeting. . Disorganised and unexpectedly long meetings can be a frustrating experience and put people off coming back. Productive meetings of 2 hours or less can be an experience which builds morale, and strengthens your organisation. At the start of the meetingYou want everyone at the meeting to feel comfortable about speaking and putting their point of view. For a meeting to work well, everyone needs to feel welcome, included and informed. Here are a few tips:
How will your meeting be run?Every chair needs some guidelines about how the group wants their meetings to be run. It helps to set out some simple rules – these must be ones everyone accepts and is prepared to work with, or they’ll be useless. Once you’ve got some rules agreed, it is much easier to chair the meeting, and people are less likely to take it personally when you ask them not to interrupt, or stop them from wandering off the topic. You need to work out the rules that suit your group, but here are some that are commonly used: Examples of meeting rules
Remember…
Chairing the meetingThe key tasks of the chair during the meeting are:
Here are some tips on each of these areas:1. Getting through the businessIt’s very frustrating for everyone if a meeting doesn’t deal with the business it needs to, or if it drags on for hours. People leave feeling demoralised and irritated – and quite possibly won’t come back. Here are a few tips:
Remember:
2. Involving everyoneHave you ever been at a meeting where no one spoke out against a particular proposal, but you discover afterwards that lots of people didn’t agree with it? This happens far too often, and means there will only be half-hearted support for the group’s decisions. You want to hear everyone’s views, and make sure everyone is included and involved in the meeting. There are two sides to this:
Ideally, you want an atmosphere where there can be genuine debate and discussion. People should be able to disagree with each other and listen to different opinions in a way that is constructive and moves everyone on. This takes time to develop, and requires the involvement of the whole group, but there are things the chair can do to help: Some tips on involving people:
3. Reaching decisionsIt’s easy for discussions to wander around and then drift away without any decision or action agreed. Or discussions get bogged down, with no one taking responsibility for finding a way through. The chair needs to keep an overview, and help the meeting to reach decisions. Don’t worry if you can’t do this straight away – it’s one of the most difficult bits of chairing, and it takes confidence and practice to do well. A few tips:
4. Dealing with difficult peopleThe chair can have to deal with ‘difficult’ people – the person who talks non-stop, or the person who ‘knows it all’, or the person who is just focussed on one particular issue. There are no easy answers, but the general way you conduct the meeting will make a difference. Here are some tips. Remember that the majority of people at the meeting will be supporting your efforts.
How did the meeting go?It is always useful to get feedback on how the meeting went. One way of doing this is to ask people at the meeting what they thought of it. You can do this at the end of the meeting. Just ask each person in turn how they thought it went. You will get some useful feedback, and it makes everyone feel involved. This tends to work best with a small group that meets regularly, but can also be useful in other situations. If it is a big public meeting, you might want to have comments or suggestion forms for people to fill out at the end of the meeting. After the meeting
More informationThe Resource Centre also has information on:
Published November 2007What is it called when group members contribute less to the group than the average member particularly as the group grows in size?When group members contribute less to the group than the average member, particularly as the group grows in size, those group members are engaged in. Social loafing.
Which of the following is a characteristic of a small group?For our purposes, small groups have three primary qualities: identity, goals and interdependence. Furthermore, a small group needs at least three members and possibly up to as many as 12 members, so long as the group is small enough to permit all members to freely speak and listen.
Which is a characteristic of small groups quizlet?Which of these is a characteristic of small groups? They have organizing rules.
Which of the following is considered a small group?A small group requires a minimum of three people (because two people would be a pair or dyad), but the upper range of group size is contingent on the purpose of the group. When groups grow beyond fifteen to twenty members, it becomes difficult to consider them a small group based on the previous definition.
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