Are Your Meetings a Meaningless Gathering of People?
By: Paul Myers Mba
Tags: Personal Development, Business, Work, Meetings, Leadership

Essential Elements For Meaningful Meetings

The following tips summarise what many leaders view as best-practice to enhance the time invested in meetings.

Tip №1 — Ask attendees to prepare

Idea generation before a meeting is a worthwhile exercise. Now, this is not so everyone has a turn to present their idea, which can be dull and ineffective, but so that the people attending have done some thinking in advance.

In the past, I’ve attended meetings completely unprepared simply because I was invited. To allow this to happen is a failure of leadership. Brainstorming is just a technique, not the objective.

Never assume that group brainstorming is automatically a good thing. It can be bad too. It’s not what you do but how you do it that’s important.

Tip №2 — Avoid minute monologues

The rule that only one person can talk at any one time is effective in some settings, but in other situations, it can limit the number of ideas that people can discuss at the moment. Also, it allows others to coast, contribute nothing, not even thinking about the problem if their mind wanders.

People who talk can block out others from sharing their ideas. As a result, others forget what they were about to say, or don’t get the time to say it.

It’s tough to be the only speaker in a large group, I get that, but avoid a situation whereby too many people refrain from sharing their ideas because they’re afraid of sounding stupid or don't have the opportunity.

It’s not enough to simply tell people to share crazy ideas, encourage it, reward the most outrageous concept that’s likely to fail. See what happens. That’s where the diamonds lay.

Photo by krakenimages on Unsplash

Tip №3 — There is no one-size-fits-All

Facilitate open time for people to just talk with one other by limiting regulation and meeting constraints where possible.

Speed-meet, with sixty-second slots. Date meet with twenty-minute meetings. Use communal spaces of various sizes and functions with whiteboards, sofas and coffee so that colleagues can chat between meetings. Open up meetings to everyone. Some companies ping a mobile message for open meeting invites. Others use flashing lights or free food to attract attention.

Get outside. Take people out of the office. Gather at parks. Hold meetings in art galleries, pubs, clubs, arcades, restaurants, just break the norm, the mould of normal thinking. Do something less boring or, if possible, something extraordinary that scares you. Allocate time at work for writing, ideation, reading, thinking, meditation and even sleeping.

Meetings that embrace the entire being of a human can unlock the depths of our imagination.

Tip №4 — Problem-solve with purpose

Pinup articles, case studies and principles of problem-solving around the meeting room to set the tone.

Take account of what worked in the past and what didn't work. Try to figure out a way to remove the non-functional problems that impede the momentum of problem-solving.

Excite attendees. Invite participation. People can tire quickly when they run out of steam, their contribution fades as their ideas lose traction.

When people are bored, they disengage. Distractions can easily become a fascination. So to keep people on their toes, involved and alert, design a meeting with no fixed shape, boundaryless even. The type of gathering that can call on their expert involvement at random moments gets noticed.

Tip №5— Record significant contributions

Take snaps, images of group-work as it unfolds. Post-it notes or whiteboard scribbles are important too. Refine them to form a document rather than wasting time to compile an executive report of what was said and by whom.

Recording and structuring group contribution in this way has a meaningful impact on attendees. People get to see what they suggested, encouraging the group to collaborate and build on every idea, developing new insights in the process.