Does your team look forward to each and every meeting? Do your meetings effectively drive your business? Or are your meetings really status updates, rehashing the same issues over and over again, full of too many agenda items, and never seem to accomplish much? When most leaders are honest, they tell me their meetings really need improvement. Often I see unrealistic agendas and too little time set aside to discuss anything in depth. In my experience, less is more, and more is less! What I mean by this is that you probably need to have more of the right meetings and in those meetings talk less about the wrong agenda items.
Do You Conduct and/or Attend Too Many Bad Meetings?
As pointed out in Pat Lencioni’s book Death By Meeting, most people conduct/attend too many bad meetings. Is it your habit or preference to meet people one-on-one to get their ideas on major issues? Experience shows this to be very ineffective because you wind up discussing the same issue without really creating the right debate, fluidity, and speed appropriate to the matter. When you do meet in a group, do you find that the agenda is packed with so many items that it is hard to get deep in to discussing, debating, and really addressing your critical issues? What percentage of your meetings consists of status updates and presentations by various people versus constructive and vigorous debate that involves everyone in the room and thrusts the business forward to higher levels? Is it possible that you have run poor meetings for such a long period of time that you are actually just wasting a lot of leadership time?
Scheduling Frequent Meetings Helps An Organization Become More Effective
Highly effective organizations have learned to schedule a good series of daily huddles and weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual meetings that can be carefully designed to get all of the right people together at the same time. Each meeting is assigned a purpose, which is built around specific decisions that need to be made. The agenda is then constructed to facilitate making those decisions and encourages the dialog necessary to reach those decisions. The outcomes of these meetings then become policies and actions that need to be taken as a result of those decisions.
Failure to conduct and lead effective meetings is robbing you of significant growth and profits. Contact Activate Group Inc. for a FREE consultation at 305.722.7213 to see how a business coach can help you run a more effective organization.