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How not to have useless meetings?How to design memorable meetings?
A meeting is a gathering of two or more people convened for the purpose of achieving a common
goal through interaction.
Meetings are a great trap. […] They are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.– John Kenneth Galbraith, Economist, A Life in Our Times, 1981
Do you think that meetings are completely
useless?
Want to work with your peers to solve problems facing today's change management?
Learn to increase employee engagement at a Management 3.0 workshop!
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Meetings have become a popular target of corporate jokes, too often viewed simply as napping opportunities. But “productive meeting” doesn’t have to be an oxymoron.– Martha Craumer, Harvard Business Review Tools,
Better Meetings
IT consultants were invited to a meeting with one of their customers. They were supposed to make a proposition to the attendees in order to get a validation.
Despite the absence of one of the top managers (a decision maker), the meeting started on time.
Great!It only took 45 min while 2 hours were scheduled.
Finally, the missing manager arrived at the end of the presentation. Everyone seemed to appreciate the proposition but…
As they still had time, the audience asked them to do the presentation for a second time.
What would you do in the same situation?
Executives spend upwards of 18 hours per week – a third of their working week – in meetings with an estimated 25-50% of meeting time considered wasted.– Harvard Business School & London School of Economics
One topic per meeting
Meetings shouldn’t be systemized. They only make sense when the topic or issue at hand is challenging or emotional, and it would be better to address the concerns and questions of your co-workers.
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Shorter meetings are more productive than bigger ones
Meetings are not to sell your actions. They are to share the value and to decide actions together.
You should often iterate and make actions to increase collaboration and energize your team.
Illustration: Quote slide (man in front of chalkboard)
And if the expected result of a meeting is only to design memorable interactions?
To be a successful – which means productive – professional, you need to know how to design memorable meetings.– Meggin McIntosh, Way Better Meetings, 2013
You should ensure that attendees remember to be there, remember what happened and remember what their tasks and responsibilities are.
9 tips for running memorable meetings
Stop inviting, sell your meeting
Make decisions quickly, even if they are imperfect
Kitchens are better than conference rooms
Break the ice
Energize your meetings with games
Make meetings visual
Encourage the clash of ideas
Promote transparency
Seek to improve
Stop inviting, sell your meeting
Making sure that your team does meaningful work when they get together can be one of the most impactful goals you can make.
When you want people to attend, you should learn to communicate the value of the meeting so that people want to attend. And everyone can participate.
If you cannot convince your coworkers to attend your meeting, it is your problem, not theirs!
Your attendees want something different – something they haven’t seen before.
Kitchens are better than conference rooms
Start off a meeting with an “icebreaker”. It increases the energy in the meeting, gets everybody involved, and as a byproduct, also helps you find out more about your coworkers.
Break the ice
FAVI, for many years, had the practice of starting every meeting with all participants sharing a brief story of someone they had recently thanked or congratulated. The practice had a beautiful effect on the meeting: it created a mood of possibility, gratitude, celebration, and trust in other people’s goodness and talents. Focusing on others and their accomplishments can also help people to shift their concern away from self-centred goals they might have come into the meeting with (“I need to get X out of the meeting”) and reconnect with the broader needs of the organization.
– Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations
You should use stage games or competitions that challenge people mentally or physically during breaks or if energy is lagging.
Games involve light physical activity.
Energize your meetings with games
Visual meetings are not only more fun than normal meetings, they are also more interactive and productive.Participants of visual meetings are more engaged and prepared for action.
https://youtu.be/45qCO54Sa9s
Make meetings visual
Too often, people strive for consensus which leaves fertile ground untilled. In a good meeting, people get fired up arguing their points.
A genuine leader is not a searcher of consensus but a molder of consensus. – Martin Luther King
Encourage the clash of ideas
Getting traction on a single thing is far more useful than touching on many without forward momentum on any.
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Make decisions quickly, even if they are imperfect
Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund with $145 billion in assets, takes one such approach: Every meeting is recorded and made available to all employees. Bridgewater’s founder, Ray Dalio, explains: “My most important principle is that getting at the truth … is essential for getting better. We get at truth through radical transparency and putting aside our ego barriers in order to explore our mistakes and personal weaknesses so that we can improve.- Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!
Promote transparency
The sign of a great meeting isn’t the meeting itself. It’s what happens after that meeting.
• What did we learn?
• What was valuable?
• What are we going to do?
• How will we assess the success of our next steps?
http://agilestrides.com/2015/11/16/getting-roi-out-of-a-happiness-wall/
Seek to improve
Illustration: Quote slide (man in front of chalkboard)
Effective meetings don’t happen by accident, they happen by design.– Catherine Mattiske, Making Meetings Work, 2010
Way Better Meetings – Meggin McIntosh http://amzn.to/29aS09R
Gamestorming – Dave Gray http://bit.ly/299wGC8
HBR Tools: Better Meetings – Harvard Business Review http://bit.ly/29wabXi
Making Meetings Work – Catherine Mattiske http://bit.ly/296EGC2
Visual Meetings – David Sibbet http://bit.ly/29w9v4h
Reading List
Want to work with your peers to solve problems facing today's change management?
Learn to increase employee engagement at a Management 3.0 workshop!
https://management30.com/events/
Text: François Rivard, Loïc Léofold Illustrations: Chad Geran Design: Muuks
