TAKE CHARGE!
TIPS FOR RUNNING
MEETINGS
SMOOTHLY
Guidelines for planning and
conducting meetings, to
help you get the most
value from participants.
BY KENNETH J. HIRSH
28 AALL SPECTRUM | WWW.AALLNET.ORG
C
ongratulations! You’ve been elected president of an
organization or you’ve been named a committee chair.
Perhaps you are a supervisor, and among your duties is
running staff meetings. Regardless of the reason, you’ve
taken on the responsibility of running a meeting that not
only requires your attention and time but also the time of
other people, which you wish to respect. Whether you feel anxious or
confident about running your next meeting, the following tips to better
run your meetings and summary of the rules of parliamentary procedure
(i.e., the rules of the road for most meetings) could prove beneficial.
Planning Your Meeting
All meetings have a primary purpose,
understanding that purpose will help
you to fulfill it while using everyone’s
time as efficiently as possible. Your
group might be meeting to gather
information, to solicit feedback, to
brainstorm, or to make progress toward
or reach a decision. Hence, the first step
to conducting a successful meeting is to
understand its primary purpose.
The aims for your meeting should
determine several parameters:
¡¡
Who else will participate; keep in
mind that every attendee’s time is
valuable.
¡¡
The agenda; nearly every meeting
should have a written agenda prepared and distributed well enough in
advance that attendees can prepare
for discussion. The agenda is also
your outline to keep the meeting on
course and ensure that all relevant
and important topics are discussed.
¡¡
The length of the meeting; it should
balance the time you need to accomplish its purpose with the availability
of the participants.
¡¡
The nature of the participation of the
other attendees; are they stakeholders in any decisions to be made or
are you merely sharing information
with them?
Conducting the Meeting
Ilmage © iStockPhoto.com.
Be on time, start on time. It should go
without saying: be on time, or, better
yet, be a little early for a meeting you are
leading. First, you called the meeting,
so it cannot start without you. If you are
late, you are showing disregard for the
time of the punctual attendees. Second,
when you start on time you set a good
example for the other attendees, and
they learn that you value their time as
much as you do your own.
Follow the order of your agenda.
More formal meetings will require
a vote to approve the agenda at the
All meetings have a primary purpose, understanding that
purpose will help you to fulfill it while using everyone’s time as
efficiently as possible. … Hence, the first step to conducting a
successful meeting is to understand its primary purpose.
opening of the meeting and another
vote to make any subsequent changes
to the agenda. Informal meetings, such
as a regularly scheduled staff meeting,
likely do not require such formalities.
However, following the agenda will
make it clear when your discussion
goes off track, and you can then use the
agenda to guide everyone back to the
issues at hand.
Offer ample opportunities for all
participants to have their say. Not
only does this increase the likelihood
of broad buy-in for decisions made
at, or as a result of, the meeting but it
also encourages participants to share
information that you or other decision-makers may not have known.
Know when to end discussion. If
you teach legal research, you may tell
your students that they’ve reached the
end of their work when everything
they find repeats something they’ve
already discovered. Apply this rule to
your discussion: when the same voices
are repeating points that have already
been made, it’s time to call for a vote or
otherwise move on.
End the meeting on time. If an
important matter is under discussion and needs to be resolved before
you adjourn, pause to ask the group’s
permission to extend the meeting. In a
formal meeting with a set adjournment
time, you will need to call for a vote to
extend the meeting.
Recap and follow-up. Before you
break up the group, reiterate any
decisions reached and any assignments made for follow-up action.
Communicate these in writing by
the end of the next business day. This
reinforces recollections of assignments and offers an opportunity to
clarify any misunderstandings of
responsibilities.
Remote Participation in Meetings
IT’S PARLIAMENTARY
For more information,
readers who wish to formally
study parliamentary
procedure or even become a
professional parliamentarian
will find useful information on
the website of the American
Institute of Parliamentarians
at www.aipparl.org.
The Standard Code of
Parliamentary Procedure
and Robert’s Rules of Order
Newly Revised are available
from bookstores.
Conference calls and other forms of
remote participation in meetings present challenges to the meeting leader
and all of the participants. Remote
participants in a meeting that includes
several people at the host site (“mixed
attendance meetings”) are at a disadvantage in that they cannot observe
the body language of others, may not
recognize the voice of the speaker, and
may not be able to see who has asked
to be recognized. The meeting leader
and participants can take a few steps
to minimize the confusion that might
otherwise ensue:
¡¡
During an apparent pause, remote
participants should audibly ask for
recognition and wait for permission
before continuing to speak.
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015 | AALL SPECTRUM 29
Legal information professionals do not hesitate to refer to statutes,
regulations, and cases to help their clients and students
understand the applicable law in a given situation. Surprisingly,
it is not unusual that they are unfamiliar with the more common
rulebooks for governing meetings.
¡¡
The chair should announce the
names of those who are in the speaking queue.
¡¡
Every speaker should identify himself or herself aloud before making
substantive remarks.
At a meeting when all participants are
remotely participating, the relative disadvantage of each is reduced, but the
above tips will help facilitate efficient
and civil discussion.
Rules for Conduct of Meetings
All but the most informal meetings
need rules to ensure fair and efficient proceedings. Legal information
professionals do not hesitate to refer to
statutes, regulations, and cases to help
their clients and students understand
the applicable law in a given situation.
Surprisingly, it is not unusual to find
that many are unfamiliar with the
more common rulebooks for governing the meetings that they attend.
In the United States, the two most
commonly used rules handbooks
are Robert’s Rules of Order and the
American Institute of Parliamentarians
Standard Code of Parliamentary
Procedure. The former was first published by then U.S. Army Major (and
later Brigadier General) Henry M.
Robert in 1876, and the latter was first
published in 1950 by Alice Sturgis,
whose surname was part of the title
through several editions until the latest
revision in 2012. Many still informally
refer to the volume as “Sturgis.”
Robert adapted the rules used by
the U.S. House of Representatives
(which were largely taken from
Thomas Jefferson’s A Manual of
Parliamentary Practice) to be more
useful to “ordinary societies” rather
30 AALL SPECTRUM | WWW.AALLNET.ORG
than legislative bodies. It has been
revised several times, with the most
recent edition published in 2011 as
Robert’s Rules of Order Newly Revised.
Alice Sturgis wrote her Standard
Code to simplify rules and remove
archaic language. She preserved
fundamental principles of procedure
while trying to make the rules easier
to understand.
The American Association of Law
Libraries (AALL) used Robert’s Rules
until 1996, when the membership
approved a change to the organization’s
constitution to make the Standard
Code the governing authority for AALL
meetings. The rules discussed below
are as provided in the Standard Code.
The handbook sets out several
fundamental principles of parliamentary procedure, and it is useful to keep
these in mind when running a meeting. Among them are equality of rights,
majority vote decides, minority rights
of participation are protected, the right
of discussion, the right to information,
and all actions should be taken in fairness and good faith.
Just as nature abhors a vacuum,
discussion at a business meeting
should begin with a proposal to do
something. A member makes that proposal by first seeking to be recognized
(i.e., called upon by the chair) and,
once having been “given the floor,”
states “I move that …” followed by the
detailed action to be taken. In a large
meeting the member will stand to be
heard; this is called “rising to speak.”
Following the movant’s making the
motion, the chair repeats the language
of the motion in the form, “It has been
moved that …” and calls for a second
of the motion. If there is a second by
another member, the chair notes that
and opens discussion of the motion. If
there is no second, the motion dies for
lack of a second.
There is one instance when a
second to a motion is not required:
when a committee of the membership
is proposing action in its report. It is
assumed that a majority of committee
members voted in favor of its report,
and hence it is assumed that the report
already carries the support of two or
more members. Therefore, once any
member moves the adoption of a committee report or recommendation, the
chair opens discussion.
The requirement that a motion be
“on the floor” before starting discussion ensures more efficient use of time
and promotes clarity, but there are
times when informal discussion of
ideas may ultimately be beneficial. In
such cases, a member may move for
informal discussion of a topic without
proposing a specific action, and, upon
second and passage, the meeting may
conduct a more informal but still courteous discussion. Informal discussion
is brought to its end by either a motion
to take some action resulting from the
points made in the discussion or, in the
absence of such a motion, to end the
informal discussion.
Once a motion is on the floor, the
chair should call in order on those
who seek to be recognized by raising
their hands. Typically the chair first
calls upon the movant to expand on
the motion and to explain its rationale.
If the chair is aware of the sides that
particular members have taken on the
issue, then he or she may alternate calling on speakers for each side. The chair
should ensure that all who wish to
speak are given the opportunity to do
so. At a point when there remains no
one who wishes to speak, the chair asks
if the group is ready to vote. If no one
expresses disagreement, the chair will
call the vote, first by those who vote in
the affirmative with “yea” or “yes,” and
then by those who vote in the negative
with “nay” or “no.”
If some members still wish to continue speaking when the chair or other
members believe that fruitful discussion has concluded, then a member
summarizes the various motions and
gives their relative rank, whether
they are debatable and amendable,
and whether a two-thirds vote is
required for passage. Several versions
of similar tables are available online,
including one from UC San Diego
found at cseweb.ucsd.edu/~ddahlstr/
misc/roberts/parlia_sturgis.pdf.
Another principle to note is that
additional rules, such as those setting
limits on meeting time or debate, may
be adopted by majority rule at the outset
of the meeting, but subsequently changing the limits on debate or the meeting
time will require a two-thirds vote.
An individual who is trained in
applying the rules of parliamentary procedure is called, of course, a “parliamentarian.” If you have attended an AALL
Annual Business Meeting, you may
have noticed that there is a professional
parliamentarian present to advise the
president on applying the rules when
a question of procedure arises. It is the
president’s own authority that implements the professional advice given by
the parliamentarian through a “ruling
by the chair.” As provided by the rules
themselves, a ruling by the chair may be
appealed to the membership by motion
and second. A majority vote is required
to overturn the ruling. ¢
KENNETH J. HIRSH
DIRECTOR OF THE LAW LIBRARY
AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
AND PROFESSOR OF PRACTICE
University of Cincinnati College of Law
Cincinnati, Ohio
ken.hirsh@uc.edu
© KENNETH J. HIRSH, 2015
may rise to move to close debate.
Following a second, the chair immediately puts this motion to a vote, and if a
two-thirds majority approves, the chair
then calls the vote on the main motion.
If the motion to close debate fails,
then discussion of the main motion
continues.
As discussed earlier, the motion first
made to take some action is called “the
main motion.” A main motion, in addition to being subject to discussion following its seconding, is subject to the
introduction of subsidiary, privileged,
and incidental motions. One example
of a subsidiary motion is a motion to
amend. Such a motion is in order while
the main motion is being debated.
The rules spell out in detail which
motions may properly be made or “are
in order” when a given motion is on
the floor. The inside cover pages of
the Standard Code include a table that
Ken is a strictly amateur parliamentarian.
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