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Teaching the Meeters to Meet

There are two parts to teaching people how to hold a meeting. One is to set aside a part of each meeting, at the end, to briefly discuss the meeting itself. People can speak up about how they felt and what they wanted to have happen, what didn't happen, how it was too long and boring, and criticize the chair and each other. This is touchy, but some form of criticism is necessary to collective action, unless you are willing to have a boss who does it all for you. Keep it impersonal, be gentle, understand each other as best you can, and it can be a really good thing for the group. Try to work out how the meeting or some part of the meeting could have been done better.

The second part of teaching the meeters how to meet is to rotate the chair. You do this for the obvious reason - that you need to have more than one good chair in the group, and also for the purpose of teaching the membership how to be in a meeting, how it really works, how to be chaired. What you want is a whole room full of good chairs, all just chairing the crap out of themselves and each other and all keeping an eye on the process and the big picture as well as taking part as members. Then you've really got something. Then you really make the chips fly. It's a bit like the way waiters love to wait on other waiters, because they know what's going on, are sympathetic and appreciative and help the process along. Ditto with the chair. It's a real joy to chair people who know how to chair.

If you've got an experienced chair, get him/her to chair a few meetings to show how it's done. Then start putting one brave soul at a time in the hot seat with the experienced chair as co-chair to step in as needed and guide the trainee. Keep the same trainee in the chair for several consecutive meetings, until h/she is actually getting the hang of it. Take the time at the end of the meeting to critique, ever so gently and positively, the chairship and to suggest better ways to handle situations. Keep it rotating slowly in this manner and eventually you'll have a group that's a breeze to chair, and who can go out and do the same thing elsewhere. We're all leaders, right? If nobody in the group really knows how to do it, then you all have to learn together. Do this as a group project and give it the priority it deserves. Train yourselves one or two at a time, not with a too-fast rotation where nobody ever gets a chance to really get it down. It takes time.

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