Make Meetings Great Again

Most meetings don't matter. There are only three types of meetings that do.

1. A meeting to build understanding

2. A meeting to shape choices

3. A meeting to make decisions.

If your meeting is not one of those, carefully consider whether it needs to be a meeting, or whether you should use other tools instead (email, phone call, shared document, decision, 1:1, instant message, video memo, etc).

If you must have a meeting, be clear about decision rights and responsibilities. That way, people can act autonomously within their delegation and make sure only the people who need to be in a meeting are called to be there.

But aren't meetings important for connection?

The most common objection to this idea, which challenges the practice of holding large, unwieldy, frequent meetings, is about culture.

People say things like:

"But the value of connecting isn't always about what gets done in the meeting."

"It's nice to just catch up and build bonds with people."

"We need human connection to have a good culture."

I don't disagree with those things on the face of them, however: I don't think we should be relying on meetings to make them happen. Culture is extremely important as we all struggle to get things done, retain staff and keep people engaged and fulfilled in their work.

But using work meetings as a stealth tool is counterproductive. It just adds to people's overwhelm. It creates stress, resentment and crowds out time for doing the work that needs doing.

How to build culture without awful meetings

If you're trying to build social bonds between team members..

• Don't fill people's calendars with meetings willy nilly under the guise of productivity and create an exponential overhead that slows your entire organisation down.
• Don't create an environment of back-to-back meetings that run over and start late and expect people to pick up the slack in their own time because you don't have a more creative way to allow people to form meaningful relationships.
• Do something that's fun. If you want people to catch up, and you think that's important enough to use their work hours for, make space for that, call it that, and make it worth it.
• Do hold events that bring people together. If you're trying to break down siloes, hold an event for that specific purpose, and create better processes, rather than a host of crappy working groups and committees that people come to actively avoid attending.

What to do now

If you must run meetings, well, your meetings need to matter. And if you're going to run meetings that matter, and you haven't done my Meetings that Matter training, I'm here to help.

I've just slashed the price of Meetings that Matter, my gold-standard strategic facilitation training programme, to $99. This is obscene. I am basically Harvey Norman. I charge between $500 and $1500 per person for this training, depending on whether you're doing it self-led, online or in-person. I charge $15,000 for a single in-house training day. This sort of "super low price online course bla bla bla" promotion is not my usual style, and not what you can usually expect from this newsletter.

But right now, I'm so SICK of everyone suffering through crappy meetings, that I've exploded in frustration and opened this goodness to the world. I can help, and it's ridiculous that I'm not helping you right now.

Enrol now and you get the video curriculum, quizzes, templates, and an epic workbook packed full of tools and exercises to get you on your way. Bam. Just like that.