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!

Comments

[Al Pittampalli]

Thanks so much for the support, Anna! Looking forward to our interview.

[Anna Farmery]

Al - really looking forward to speaking with you. Meetings are such a drain when not done correctly and yet so inspiring when done right....one thing I always did was run a 1 minute warm up session at the start to get our minds thinking creatively...that always helped.

[Tessa Duckett]

Agreed! 4 hour meetings can be daunting when they don't pertain to everyone in the group.

[Wesley Wise]

I definitely agree with tip number 5 "Don't treat brainstorming like a meeting." No ideas will come up if the ambiance is like a business meeting. Personally, I'd request a meeting at a different place aside from our usual work area, like for example in a restaurant or a cafe. The ambiance and the aura would be different and non-stressful.

[Anna Farmery]

And why are they 4 hrs...thats not a meeting thats wasting half a day.

Quick tip I used was making the time of meetings

10.54 to 11.16

We get so stuck to half hours we fill the time!

[Anna Farmery]

My best 'meetings' are when we go for a walk...people are much more relaxed and you can throw things around without feeling under pressure...

[Steve Wilheir]

Conflict can be a (pun fairly intended) double-edged sword. I've seen meetings where no one has read the preparatory material and go into a meeting blindly accepting everything because they don't have any real insight into the problems at hand. Otoh, I've seen meeting degrade to near fisticuffs when political rivals smash one another's ideas simply because they represent the wrong side of the organization. The trick is to know how much conflict to allow, when to table the conversion, and when to get out the 3' wide fluffy punching gloves so those two can just go somewhere and work out their issues.

- Steve
http://Twitter.com/GanttGuru

[Anna]

Absolutely....but also it is about culture established over time.

In the first instance - if you allow people to come unprepared..then you get what you deserve...bad decisions

In the second example.....if you develop a culture which doesn't respect other ideas.....and foster more angels advocates than devils advocate then you will get bad decisions?

[steve @ conference facilities oxford]

I think we've all seen people going at it in meetings. I agree with Al's view up to a point, but in my opinion, conflict tends to run to a loss of control in the meeting, however controlled that conflict is.