The first rule of running a meeting is to always start on time. No matter what else is going on, respecting those who have arrived on time, is important.
I always ran my meetings with an Agenda. I didn’t share the Agenda with everyone, but I always choose one person to help run the meeting. At first I would choose the person who came in late, but then it seemed like punishment, so I started picking those who might have been disruptive at the previous meeting.
I would start the meeting off and then after all the details were taken care of I would have them take over when it was time to have the member presentation. Then the Power Partner request, which is a strategic alliance, took up about ten minutes. The Agenda had specific time allocated to each activity.
The the next activity was to provide leads for the other members. It was so rewarding to see how everyone was so generous was. They would go out of their way to help each other.
The great part of having others facilitate the meeting was I not only got to work harder on creating leads for myself, but I saw how different the facilitator acted in the future meetings.