by John J. Walters

The past two weeks I’ve talked about how meetings generally suck, and that most people who are there would rather be anywhere else.  A quick search of the web will show that there are indeed other people who think meetings suck — and are talking about it!

One of them is Sue Pelletier, whose list of her top ten reasons to bolt from a meeting was the focus of last week’s post.  This week’s seed article is a very well written piece by Craig Borysowich about the importance of keeping your eyes on the prize when it comes to meetings.

It’s no secret that one of the keys to a good meeting is having an agenda so everyone starts off at the same point and on the right foot.  The quality of feedback will vary greatly between a meeting where everyone sits down prepared and one where nobody knows what the topic is until they see the first power point slide.

Can you imagine asking a teacher to waltz into a classroom and teach a class on a topic of your choice without any preparation whatsoever?  They might be able to pull it off if all the conditions are right.  Perhaps they have a good grasp of the chosen subject, or maybe they’ve been to a particularly informative seminar on a similar topic.  But the odds that they’ll stumble around and generally confuse the students are much greater the less preparation you allow them.

Holding a meeting without an agenda, or even with a brief or vague agenda, is kind of like that, except there are multiple teachers in the room.  Everyone is expected to both inform and be informed; participation is mandatory.  There are often large costs (in terms of lost productivity) associated with everyone leaving the meeting and going off on their own to relearn everything they were supposed to learn during the meeting, if this is even possible.

Yes, the stakes are high, but luckily one of the best ways to mitigate the risk that everyone will leave the room saying, “Well that was a complete waste of my life,” is also quite simple.

When planning a meeting, write down everything you want to get accomplished.  Send this list out to all attendees and ask for their input.  Revise this into a solid agenda for the meeting and send it out a few days prior so everyone can show up prepared.  If you can’t do all this, then maybe it’s time to rethink why you’re scheduling the meeting in the first place.

In a nutshell: plan meetings with the agenda right from the start.  Get input, listen to it, and start the process early enough so there are no surprises.

I know this sounds like it may take a bit more time and preparation than your standard meetings, but maybe that’s why standard meetings tend to suck so much.

by John J. Walters

I think it was Charles Dickens who observed that rich folks (back in “the day”) would pay good money to buy and maintain a horse and buggy to ride for pleasure, while they would turn up their noses at a delivery job that required them to drive one every day (and would pay them to do it).

In the same way, employees everywhere complain about meetings, and yet when we all go out to happy hour after work, what exactly is it that we all talk about?  You guessed it — work!  Sure, there might be a good amount of gossip in there too, but the fact is that it’s hard to escape talking about something that you spend so much time focused on.

The key difference here, besides the alcohol, is that there are no rules governing happy hour.  We’re all free to stay as long as we please, and most of us choose to stay longer than the average meeting.  The interesting thing to note is that we could all rush home to do whatever it is we were daydreaming about all day.  But we choose to stay, and (often) to talk about work.

Yes, there is a certain natural resistance to attending meetings, just as there is a certain natural draw to happy hour.  Most likely, this is because everyone has attended more than their fair share of ineffective and inefficient meetings, and so they assume that this will be the case with all meetings.  So, when you’re scheduling a meeting, always remember that people don’t want to be there.

Sue Pelletier of meetingsnet.com even went so far as to create a top-10 list of the best ways to drive her from a meeting, and I have to say that I agree with all of them (and could probably add a few to the list).  As a service to you, the reader who probably doesn’t click hyperlinks, I have condensed the list into a brief list that I call…

The Ten Commandments of Meetings

• Thou shalt not run a meeting entirely from PowerPoint.
• Thou shalt not keep attendees sitting in a dark, uncomfortable room for too long.
• Thou shalt not use too much jargon and too many clever acronyms.
• Thou shalt not impart useful information without leaving time for it to sink in.
• Thou shalt not be too serious all the time.
• Thou shalt not completely ignore the agenda once a meeting begins.
• Thou shalt not hold the meeting in a room nobody can find.
• Thou shalt not open with a completely unrelated keynote speaker.
• Thou shalt not be rude to others in attendance.
• Thou shalt not encourage cliques among your attendees.

I can’t guarantee that following these rules will get you into “meeting heaven” but they do provide a decent jumping off point.  If you can think back to some of the worst meetings you’ve ever attended — the ones you really wanted to leave early — I’ll bet they violated at least one of these commandments.