6 Tips to Reinvent your Next Meeting

Many of you will know how I hate meetings....not great meetings...just those which are a waste of everyone's time. Anyway, coming up later in August on The Engaging Brand podcast is a discussion on meetings with Al Pittampalli who is a meeting culture warrier!

His new book is called Read This Before Our Next Meeting published by the Domino Project. (As of today there is a free download on Amazon until 9 August!) Ahead of our interview I asked for 6 tips to reinvent your meeting

1. Decide before the meeting not during. People have come to use meetings as a stalling tactic for tough decisions. Groups are great at disagreeing but they're horrible at agreeing, and the decision rarely gets made on time. Make a preliminary decision before you call a meeting. Then use the meeting to get buy-in or alter the decision.
2. Encourage conflict. Sometimes we suppress conflict because it feels too volatile. But conflict is healthy and can lead to great intelligent decisions. Look for disagreement in your meeting, and encourage it in a way that doesn't get personal
3. Don't get people up to speed. If you're catching people up in a meeting on background information you've already lost. The meeting time should be sacred, short, and powerful. Give people pre-meeting homework that explains everything except for the heart of what needs to be discussed.
4. Enforce hard deadlines. When a decision needs to be resolved by the end of a meeting, it changes the way people engage. With no deadline, it makes it likely or inevitable the discussion will go on forever.
5. Don't treat brainstorming like a meeting. A brainstorm is an anti-meeting. It should look nothing like a meeting. Make it fun, active, devoid of criticism and even evalution. Get interested people in the room, and intimidating people out.
6. Reject the unprepared. Meetings have been based around disseminating information for so long that preparation seemed at best redundant, at worst a waste of time. Meetings should be about decisions, in which case if you're unprepared, your ability to influence the decision is diminshed. Your loss.

If you can't wait for our discussion later this month then you can find him at ModernMeetingStandard.com and grab your free download!