Building Efficient Meetings and Producing Effective Decisions: Achieve Twice as Much in Half the Time
Summary
Note: This course meets on two Thursday mornings, October 16th and 30th.
This session shares results from the Meetings Masters/Decision Maestros Research Project intended to help social workers conduct more effective meetings. The first part of the session highlights practices from Meeting Masters, including the Menu Agenda, and the Agenda Bell. Principles of the Meeting Masters help social workers in the four phases of meeting - preplanning, facilitating/running the meeting itself, processing items for the next meeting, and follow up and implementation of decisions and actions.
The second portion reviews several examples of "decision rottenosity" and outlines the process of decision crystallization to produce regular high quality decisions.
Describe challenges in effectiveness that surface in meetings social workers routinely have, such as staff meetings, staff consultations, supervisory meetings, agency board meetings, etc.
Describe what occurs during the three phases of a meeting.
Develop an agenda for a staff meeting.
Describe how to know when it is appropriate to call for a decision.
Describe how to propose a decision using decision rules.
Describe the process of decision crystallization.
Agenda
Date
Time
Description
October 16, 2025
9:00am - 9:30am
Introduction to Producing Efficient Meetings and Building High Quality Decisions
October 16, 2025
9:30am - 10:00am
Rules from the Meetings Masters Principles of Efficient Meetings
October 16, 2025
10:30am - 11:00am
The Agenda Bell + The Menu Agenda
October 16, 2025
11:00am - 11:30am
Meeting Evaluation
October 16, 2025
11:30am - 12:00pm
Takeaway/Lessons Learned/Assignments for October 30th
October 30, 2025
9:30am - 10:00am
Building High Quality Decisions
October 30, 2025
9:00am - 9:30am
Introduction/Review of Assignments
October 30, 2025
10:00am - 10:30am
Being a Decision Leader/Manager: The Decision Maestro
October 30, 2025
10:30am - 11:00am
Decision Rules - Norms that Help Decisions be "OK"