Big questions enable bold choices
Most meetings and workshops are a waste of time. They're full of people resolving trivial issues that could be handled by email or delegation with...
4 min read
Alicia McKay Aug 1, 2022 9:57:43 AM
I'm a big fan of individuals taking charge of the meetings they're in. In fact, I'd love to banish boring and frustrating workshops. I care so much about it that I launched Meetings that Matter in 2020 and we've had over 1,000 people learn to do better since.
Knowing how to lead important conversations is a non-negotiable skill for anyone in change or in charge. In Meetings that Matter, we learn strategies for getting the best out of people, moving conversations along, focusing on the important stuff and keeping momentum moving outside the room.
But there's a point at which all this meeting improvement gets a bit... victim-blaming. If you have a toxic meeting culture in your workplace, making individual meetings better can be like shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic.
If you've ticked off more than three of these, it might be time to stop blaming your own discipline and zoom out a bit - chances are, it's your whole team or workplace that needs a shake up.
This kind of pressure is bad enough for one person, but when you multiply it across dozens, hundreds (or thousands!) of people, entire companies sag under the weight of bad meeting culture. Morale drops off, people are stressed, productivity plummets and the joy starts to get lost.
If you're in a leadership position, it's your job to leave things better than you found them. It's exactly at the point where you can take a bit more control of your own calendar and start to leave some of this overwhelm behind that you should think about changing things for everyone.
I'm a policy wonk by trade. One of the most frustrating misconceptions about policy is that they're a barrier, constraint or annoyance. That might often be true, but it shouldn't be. Policy should make people's lives easier, by creating clear boundaries, scaffolds and processes that remove ambiguity and make doing the right thing easy.
If your team or workplace doesn't currently have a policy on how you handle meetings, here's some things you might like to include in yours.
Like all policies, writing a document is not enough. For your policy to be effective, it needs a few important things:
Above all, cultural shift doesn't require more posters, more meetings about collaboration, more expensive consultants to run innovation workshops or more hand-wringing around the leadership table.
It requires good policy to create permission for people to work in ways that get good work done. Easy as that. (For more on the hierarchy of organisational needs, read this.)
PS - I'd love to hear about workplaces that already have a great meeting policy! If that's you... pop it in the comments.
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