Ch. 3: Additional Case 1

Improving Your Meeting Skills

This case is best for groups.

Background

In your technical-communication course, as well as in many of your other courses, you will likely prepare one or more collaborative assignments. As discussed in Chapter 3 of your textbook, group meetings are an essential part of collaboration. In this case, you will study an article on improving meeting effectiveness in business contexts. You will then apply the author’s principles to the kind of group meetings you carry out in preparing collaborative assignments.

Your Assignment

To complete this assignment, perform the following tasks:

  1. Study Chapter 3, focusing on conducting meetings.

  2. Study James L. Creighton’s article Using Group Process Techniques to Improve Meeting Effectiveness.

  3. Meet with your group to discuss the following question: “Which techniques presented in the Creighton article can help our group operate effectively and efficiently?” Your goal for this meeting is to reach consensus about which techniques, processes, or guidelines the group should use in conducting meetings. In this meeting, draft a one-page summary of guidelines, based on Creighton’s article and your textbook’s discussion of the topic, that your group can use in its future meetings.

  4. Meet again, this time to discuss and revise the draft of the guidelines.

  5. Write a 1,000-word memo to your instructor about the process you have carried out. Do you think the guidelines will be helpful? Did you notice that any of the members of your group participated differently in the second meeting than they did in the first meeting? Did the interaction among group members in the second meeting seem different from that in the first meeting? (See Chapter 9 for a discussion of memos.)