You try to be a good leader for your business. You created a vision for your business (or for your department) and you shared it with your people. You work on a daily basis to make sure that they have the tools and information they need to do their jobs as efficiently and effectively as possible.

One of the tools you use in leadership is the meeting. Meetings, however, can be as much a liability as they can an asset. If you’re not smart about how you run your meetings, when you choose to have meetings, your people will come to dread them. Effective meetings require effective management. Here are six ways to get your people excited about meetings, and walk away with as much benefit as possible:

1. Avoid unnecessary meetings. The first rule in getting your people not to hate meetings is to not have too many. While you may feel like a Monday morning meeting is just the right thing to set the tone for the week, your staff may not feel the same. In fact, many of them are still thinking about the weekend, and the last thing they want to do is sit through an unnecessary meeting. That’s not to say weekly meetings are always a bad idea; just make sure that there’s truly something to meet about before you do. For many businesses and teams, a monthly meeting is enough with weekly updates communicated via other means, such as email.
2. Share ownership of the meeting. It’s a basic fact of human nature: we’re much more interested in our own things than we are in someone else’s. Accordingly, if you want to get people excited about a meeting, let them make it their own. Devoting even a few minutes to key personnel can let them feel like the whole process was worthwhile. If for some reason it’s important to your business processes to have meetings on a regular schedule, consider passing the role of facilitating the meeting around your team.
3. Provide incentives for attending (and paying attention) during a meeting. Food is often a great motivator for teams. Simply having a nice selection of bagels and cream cheese can help encourage meeting attendance and participation. As much as we human beings like to think we’re motivated by higher interests, the fact of the matter is that over time your team will begin to make an unconscious association between meeting time and those delectable treats.
4. Consider creative meeting venues. Sitting around a table in a conference room can be a great way to get things done fast. It’s also a great way to stifle creativity. For a change of pace, get out from under the fluorescent glow of the conference room and hold your meetings somewhere else. Holding your meeting at a local restaurant (see #3 above) is a good option. Even switching things up and holding the meeting in a different part of the building can help to keep things fresh.
5. Vary presentation formats. If the primary purpose of a given meeting is to disseminate information, the last thing you want to do is barrage your team with data verbally for an hour and a half. Likewise, all PowerPoint presentations start to look the same after a while. If you have the time and resources, consider breaking things up with a variety of presentation formats. That can include verbal, slideshows, videos, and even small group activities.
6. Use breakout sessions to troubleshoot and to collect feedback. Consider stopping during a meeting to break into small groups. Small groups can do a number of things for you in the middle of a meeting. For example, they can work to brainstorm possible solutions to a problem presented during the meeting. They can also be a great source of feedback. You can even use a breakout session like this during your next meeting to try to get ideas about making meetings more exciting.

Meetings can be more than a necessary evil. A good leader is able to identify ways to give people the information they need, have the discussions that need to happen, and still keep everyone interested. Try any one of these six tactics and you may soon find that your people stop dreading those meetings and may even start asking when the next meeting will be scheduled.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Katie Reynolds is the Marketing Manager of Webinars and Public Relations at Vistage International, a business coaching organization that helps CEO members build better companies through unique executive coaching and executive development opportunities.