jbabilon's picture Submitted by jbabilon on
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General Questions and Comments

Hello community members,
How many of you walk out of a meeting with the feeling, that it was sort of a wasted of time? And how many of you would love to change that?

I am studying Business Administration and Managment at the University of Krems, Austria. The work assignment of our design thinking class is to evaluate the successrate for a process design concept. As long-time listener to the MT-Podcast, i'd hope to find the right experts for discussions here.

In my eyes there are three phases in regards to a business meeting, where things can go wrong:
  1. Preparation - wrong people, uncomplete agenda, no goals
  2. Execution - not in time, no focus, inconsequent moderation
  3. Documentation - incompete actions, no responsibles / due-dates

I would love to hear your experience on what can go wrong in a meeting. What have you done in order to increase your effectiveness in execution of your meetings.

Or in other words: what do you hate the most about meetings and would love to be improved.

In advance, thank you for your valuable time - looking forward for some discussions.
regards, Johannes

[edit] as i can not find the 'reply in pubilc, i had to edit the post to add a few lines:

I know about the pre-wireing a meeting or communicate DISC style. But explaining these to the hosts of the meetings i am participating would take way to long until getting good results. And might be potnetially not effecitve in case i have no rolepower or in case my knowledge is precieved as irrelevant - still it is worth a try.

I am just curious, if there is some sort of a 'short-cut' in getting good results by following a dead-simple process in order to get the meeting done in an effective way. And by that have the MT-tools speak for themselves as an explanation for why the outcome for the meeting was effective.

GlennR's picture
Submitted by GlennR on Tuesday April 24th, 2012 2:59 pm

This topic has been covered extensively on this site in both podcasts and forums so I won't repeat any of that. I will tell you that 35 years ago when I took my first full time position after college, my first boss drilled into me this:

"If nothing changes as a result of a meeting, that meeting was a waste of time."

That has influenced my meeting planning skills ever since. Therefore, I always ask: "What do I want to see changed as a result of this meeting?" Everything else follows, timing the agendas, briefing the speakers, lining up support, etc.