Episode 6 - Not Having Effective Meetings? Are You Wasting Valuable Time? Answer: Have More Meetings!

We spend most of our working lives in them. Yet, they are rarely an effective use of our time. In short, we simply aren't making the most of them. In fact, the problem is we aren't having enough of them! Listen to this podcast to learn how to have more effective meetings.

Here, we argue, that shorter and more regular meetings will keep your team on track. This will allow your meetings to be more effective.

Read Effective Meetings Podcast Transcript:

"Meetings, you're having them all day long and they're not as effective as they could be. You know this. My name is Darren and you're at the home of Sticky Learning, MBM, Trainers to the UK Grocery Industry. This is another short and sticky story about meetings. Along with emails, you spend most of your time doing either those or meetings and they're not as productive as you want. Most people feel this, they could be a lot more effective and maybe in the past, you've reached for a book or you've done some research online to try and figure out how to make meetings more effective. And what you've probably found is that the advice is about setting objectives."

Setting Objectives

"Objectives are good advice, it's just not great advice and that's because of how many people really set objectives for meetings? They do for the really, really important ones, but beyond that, the day to day meetings, they don't. Smart objectives would be ideal, but for me it's the difference between if you've seen the film, A Few Good Men, it's the difference between paper law, as Sam says, when he's fighting a court case with Tom Cruise, the difference between paper law and trial law is the difference between someone writing a book who was intellectually right. You should have objectives for meetings, but in reality, it ain't going to happen. So let me see if I can share a story about how you might do it differently and I'll follow up with some practical tips that I hope will help."

Have More Meetings to Get More Done

"When I was a kid, we had maybe more changes of seasons than we seem to now. We had extreme summers, it seemed, and extreme winters, although maybe I look back at my old childhood with rose-coloured glasses. I remember going to school one day and it had been snowing all night. I'd woken up, I was probably about nine years old, and how excited I was that snow was on the ground, and walking to school was really exciting. You've probably had that feeling. And throwing snowballs at each other all day, going out to the playground, fabulous."

"Over the next couple of days, the snow fades and it's not as exciting, but playing with snowballs, the best place to get your snowballs to get them into a ball was at the bottom of a tree where the snow had drifted up against the tree. You probably know what I mean."

"So you've got up to the base of the tree, grab a load of snow, make it into a snowball and throw it at the nearest kid. Fabulous. My point of saying that is if you were to look at a tree when it's snowed, you'll see that the snowdrift is on either side. I'm suggesting that to have more productive meetings, you should have more meetings. You won't find that in any book. And if the tree is a meeting, then what happens is the actions, and the things that get done, are the snow to the right and the snow to the left of the tree."

Are you wasting valuable time in meetings?

 

Making Meetings More Productive

"So if you want to get more done from the meetings, you want people to take more actions, you'll find what they do is think, "Ah, I've got a meeting today at two o'clock. Damn, I should have done the action from last week." And people do their actions either just before the meeting or they come out of a meeting and think. "Okay, I'll get that done while it's fresh in my mind." So they get their actions done just before the meeting or just after the meeting."