With the trend toward teams, there are more meetings in the workplace. Thus, you need meeting leadership skills for career success to run meetings and/or to be a productive member in meetings. The meeting skills presented here apply to both face-to-face and the increasing use of audio conference and videoconference meetings. Let’s take a few seconds for a humorous break. How do you define a committee? A committee is a group that takes minutes and waste hours.

Top level managers spend as much as one-third of their day in meetings, and many people dislike meetings because they believe they are often an unproductive waste of time. But it doesn’t have to be. You can develop the skills to plan, run, and help lead meetings, and deal with problem members effectively. The success or failure of meetings rests primarily with the leader, but again we can all be leaders, so if the person in charge is not running the meeting effectively, you may be able to help improve the meetings.