Building Efficient Meetings & Producing Effective Decisions: Achieve Twice as Much in Half the Time

Thursday, October 16, 2025, 9:00 AM–12:00 PM ET and Thursday, October 30, 2025, 9:00 AM–12:00 PM ET

Online via Zoom

Continuing Education Offered

• 6 hours regular live interactive online

Description

This session shares results from the Meetings Masters/Decision Maestros Research Project intended to help social workers conduct more effective meetings. The first part of the session highlights practices from Meeting Masters, including the Menu Agenda, and the Agenda Bell. Principles of the Meeting Masters help social workers in the four phases of meeting - preplanning, facilitating/running the meeting itself, processing items for the next meeting, and follow up and implementation of decisions and actions.

The second portion reviews several examples of "decision rottenosity" and outlines the process of decision crystallization to produce regular high quality decisions.

Objectives

1. Describe challenges in effectiveness that surface in meetings social workers routinely have, such as staff meetings, staff consultations, supervisory meetings, agency board meetings, etc.
2. Describe what occurs during the three phases of a meeting.
3. Develop an agenda for a staff meeting.
4. Describe how to know when it is appropriate to call for a decision.
5. Describe how to propose a decision using decision rules.
6. Describe the process of decision crystallization.

Agenda

Thursday, October 16, 2025

• 9:00am–9:30am Introduction
• 9:30am–10:30am Rules from the Meetings Masters Principles of Efficient Meetings
• 10:30am–11:00am The Agenda Bell + The Menu Agenda
• 11:00am–11:30am Meeting Evaluation
• 11:30am–12:00pm Takeaway/Lessons Learned/Assignments for October 30th

Thursday, October 30, 2025

• 9:00am–9:30am Introduction/Review of Assignments
• 9:30am–10:00am Building High Quality Decisions
• 10:00am–10:30am Being a Decision Leader/Manager: The Decision Maestro
• 10:30am–11:00am Decision Rules - Norms that Help Decisions be "OK"
• 11:00am–11:30am Decision Crystalization and Closure
• 11:30am–12:00pm Key Takeaways and Application

Instructor

John Tropman, PhD

CE Approval Statement

The University of Michigan School of Social Work, provider #1212, is approved to offer social work continuing education by the Association of Social Work Boards (ASWB) Approved Continuing Education (ACE) program. Organizations, not individual courses, are approved as ACE providers. State and provincial regulatory boards have the final authority to determine whether an individual course may be accepted for continuing education credit. The University of Michigan School of Social Work maintains responsibility for this course. ACE provider approval period: 5/15/2023-5/15/2026.

Social workers participating in this course will receive 6 general continuing education contact hours.

Please see the CE Policies page for more information about continuing education.