Jun 1, 2022
When you mention the word “meetings” to people in business, their eyes often start to roll. Why is that? Usually because they feel there are too many meetings and that the meetings they attend are not effective nor worth the time being spent. Given meetings have been around forever, you have to wonder why we haven’t done a better job yet on arranging our meetings so that they are effective. Not all meetings are created equally and I think this is where we get confused. There are very simple information sharing meetings and then at the other end of the scale, we have heavy duty, world changing, strategic meetings which will determine the fate of the enterprise over the next decade or more.
The complexity of the meetings should reflect the scale of time required and the number of people needed to attend, but often it doesn’t. Many times, we are allocating too much time and requiring too many people for meetings. These simple meetings could either be replaced with an email or could be severely truncated in terms of the time impost. The bracket of one hour seems to have become the default period for meetings and as we know from Parkinson’s Law, the content will expand to fill the time. Let’s go back to the very basics of meetings, what we need to be doing and let’s look at the different phases of the meeting.
Pre-Meeting Considerations
During the Meeting
Post-Meeting
Meetings will happen anyway, so we have a choice as to whether they will continue as a major waste of time or whether we will make them an engine for the growth of the organisation.