Effective meetings skills for VCSE board members
Meetings are a traditional and essential component of VCSE governance. For both trustees/directors and senior staff, meetings serve as a forum for discussion and agreement, planning and monitoring, communication and leadership, and decision-making. Used appropriately, meetings can challenge, inspire, illuminate and inform. They are an essential part of the trustee/director role, a mainstay of the VCSE management process and central to quality governance.
Holding effective meetings is important because they provide clear leadership and direction, ensure that debates are focused and balanced, enable decisions to be reached and ensure that resources are used to best effect.
This two-hour ‘masterclass’-style workshop helps trustees and board directors to understand their role, offers some approaches and ideas that help to tackle typical challenges, and helps to generally improve their compliance as well as their effectiveness.
Learning objectives
- To understand the skills and qualities of a good chair
- To learn ideas and approaches for chairing a successful meeting that is on time and achieves its outcomes
- To understand the protocols and boundaries for appropriate meeting etiquette and the chair’s role in managing this effectively
- To appreciate how to manage yourself and others appropriately
- To take away personal actions to apply to your role
Who should attend?
Format
Special features
Meet the trainer
Agenda
1 Welcome and introductions
- Objectives
- Good meeting, bad meeting – what’s your experience?
2 We can’t go on meeting like this
- Common meeting challenges and why they succeed or fail
- Consequences and impact for the organisation
- What’s the context?
3 Roles and responsibilities of an effective VCSE chair
- Activities and input that explore the role, skills and qualities needed
- Role of the chair: what it is and how to do it well
4 Meeting for success – ideas and approaches to meet governance challenges
- Managing time and boundaries
- Preparation and planning
- Creating the right environment
- Self-management
- Challenging personalities and good meeting behaviour
5 Final plenary session
- What’s your plan? Take-away actions
For a no-obligation discussion about running this programme for your organisation on an in-house basis, just give us a call on 01582 463465.