The Secret To Better Meetings

Meetings are an ever-present part of the modern office across all industries. Think of meetings as
a company's blood flow: When they are well-run, ideas and decisions flow through them like
oxygen through veins, invigorating every aspect of the business, stimulating new ideas and pushing
strategy forward, making it healthy and strong. But poorly run meetings restrain that blood flow.
They block innovation and make the business inactive and unhealthy.

How much of your time in a typical week is wasted in bad meetings, conference calls or poorly
communicated messages? I’ve never had anyone say less than 20%, and I sometimes hear up to
80%. On average, I hear around 50%. That’s a huge problem.

Worse, a bad meeting can be expensive. Think about how much each person in the room gets paid
by the hour. When you’ve added that all up, consider the opportunity cost of what the meeting is
taking people away from: finalizing the month’s numbers, selling your company’s product,
developing the next big innovation.

So how do you create healthy, productive, engaging, cost-effective meetings?

The key is communication — concise, clear, engaging communication. There are a few strategies
you can wield as both a leader of meetings and as a participant in them.

• Respect your attendees’ time. Start on time and end on time ... or even a few minutes early!
Leave a break between the end of your meeting and the start of another one. That way, people will
be less likely to think of their next meeting during the last few minutes of yours and will have a
clearer head as they go into the next gathering.

• Get to the point. Spend a few minutes before the meeting thinking about your message. What
do you want to get across? Make sure you say it directly, clearly and early on. If not everyone in
your audience can understand what the point was, your meeting has been a failure.

• Consider who needs to be there. If it’s not essential for someone to be in attendance, let them
off the hook. We all have too many meetings to attend; take one off someone’s to-do list.

• Consider what your audience actually needs to know. For any particular subject, there will
always be three areas of information: the entirety of the knowledge you have on the subject, what
you need your audience to know and what the audience wants to know. Anticipate the questions
that your audience might have in pursuing what they want to know. This will help make your
meeting much more efficient, as you’ll waste less time digressing into knowledge that’s not really
important to your needs or their wants.

• Set the agenda ahead of time. Giving people a sense of what they are walking into, whether
with a bullet-point agenda or handouts of key information. This allows them to come in prepared
for a specific discussion. You’ll spend less time laying out the situation and more time exploring
the relevant details.
• End with clear action items. What needs to be done, who needs to do it and when does it need
to be accomplished? This may be the most crucial step to having a meeting pay off.

How about your role as a participant, rather than a leader? Attendees can help make meetings more
productive, too.

• Turn off your cell phone or other devices. Just as you want a speaker to respect your time by
starting and ending on time and getting right to the point, you as a listener should eliminate any
potential distractions. After all, one of the biggest reasons meetings are a waste of time is that we
are all too busy multitasking to pay attention.

• Take notes. Not only does this show the speaker that you are engaged and actively listening, it
will help you remember key information later on.

• Ask questions. Remember that third area of information, what an audience wants to know? Make
sure you get what you want out of a meeting by asking questions. If you don’t understand
something, chances are others were confused too. Just make sure that you are asking a meaningful
question, not just filling space.

Meetings are a fact of life. But bad meetings don’t have to be. Think of them as opportunities to
wield your skills as a persuasive communicator. Set clear goals, respect your colleagues and
embrace new ideas. You’ll be amazed at how powerful and productive gathering together can be.