You won’t be surprised to read that the Harvard Business Review interviewed hundreds of corporate executives who said said they felt overwhelmed by their meetings. Another finding that won’t surprise you is that meetings have increased in duration and frequency and in fact, it was found that most executives spend an average of 23 hours a week in meetings.
Why are we doing this to each other? Why are we running soul-destroying, long and unstructured meetings? Why?
One solution here is please don’t invite people to the meeting unless they need to be there!
What should you do instead?
Take a leaf out of Dominic Price’s book. Dominic is the resident work futurist at Atlassian. Dominic cancelled his meetings. Yes, you read that correctly! He emptied his calendar of meetings after feeling frustrated at being consistently precluded from being able to schedule time in his working week. And guess what happened? After he began declining every meeting invitation, two thirds of the meeting invitations, ‘disappeared without trace’. Unless his colleagues could explain both the purpose of the meeting, and his role in the meeting, he simply refused to attend!
The point is, do you really need a meeting? And, who absolutely must attend?
If you need help teaching your people who to run fast, effective, well-structured meetings and achieve results when you catch up, please contact me.
Happy Presenting!
© Michelle Bowden 2020. Michelle Bowden is an authority on presentation & persuasion in business. Michelle is a CSP (the highest designation for speakers in the world), co-creator of the PRSI (a world-first psychometric indicator that tests your persuasiveness at work), best-selling internationally published author (Wiley), and a regular commentator in print, radio and online media. www.michellebowden.com.au