Are you wasting time in meetings…
Or are they purposeful and to the point? Many executives and companies have the bad habit of padding the day with meetings, thinking it’ll help their teams become more aligned and productive. If one meeting doesn’t do it, why would many?
In today’s video, Lou Fratturo, a senior executive coach with Transcend, walks you through simple action items that transform your work world into a gateway to productivity. Implementing these 6 tips will bring about the alignment within your company that you’re attempting to achieve through countless meetings. Meet right, with Transcend.
View Lou Fratturo’s Video Here
Have you ever thought to yourself, my team spends all this time in meetings, and yet somehow we’re nowhere near as aligned and productive as we need to be. So what do you do? You add more meetings to try and become more aligned and more productive.
Hi, I’m Lou Fratturo, a senior executive coach with the Transcend executive group. I used to struggle with the exact same thing and it used to drive me totally bananas. Time is one of our most precious and limited resources and yet somehow we just give time away in these unproductive meetings week after week after week. Well, there’s hope my friends and with just a few simple action items, you can make your work world and your life a ton more productive. Here’s just a sampling of a few.
Number one, go ahead and create a meeting roadmap of all of your existing meeting structures on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual basis. You may quickly find that
A: you have things out of order
B: there may be redundancy in some of those meeting structures and you might be able to reduce a few of them.
Number two, create a meeting purpose document for each meeting and then share that purpose at the beginning of one of your next meetings. If you have difficulty defining the actual purpose of a meeting, guess what, that meeting may have just become a candidate for extinction.
Number three, ask yourself, is this a decision-making meeting, or is this an information-sharing meeting? If it’s an information-sharing meeting, I wonder if there isn’t an opportunity to maybe share that information without having to have a meeting. If it’s a decision-making meeting very quickly assess who really needs to be in that meeting. I don’t know about your world, but back in the day for me, I was amazed at how meetings would simply morph and grow and grow and grow because people would invite someone from their team because they had a fear of missing out, or they were gone one week, but that person stayed from then on and before, you know, it, you’ve got 15 to 20 people sitting in a meeting where maybe only five or six are needed.
Number four, create a clear and concise agenda that prioritizes the most important topics first, and then set a time limit for each topic. If you don’t set a time limit, you know, what’s going to happen, you’re going to have your time thieves. You know whom I’m talking about. Those are the people that like to talk in essay form when they should be bottom line sentencing talking. You know whom I’m talking about. You got that visual in your mind, set those times to avoid that from happening, and stick to it. Once a clear agenda is established ahead of time. Make sure that pre-reads are part of the equation. I think a wonderful idea is to actually put the pre-reads and the meeting agenda in the calendar invite itself and get everybody that, to that meeting expecting to find it there.
Pre-reads are essential because there’s nothing worse than showing up to a meeting and asking people to read, absorb, and give feedback all within five minutes, doesn’t work, not anywhere near as productive as it could be.
That leaves time to celebrate wins. It is so important in your meeting structures to celebrate wins, things that are going right for the company, and things that are happening in the lives of your people. Gone are the days of checking in your personal lives at the front door of the company and being nothing but a business robot. Those days are over. In fact, most of us are doing what we do right now from home. Celebrate the wins of your people and the accomplishments at work.
The last thing is we always left five minutes at the end of a meeting to do a quick summary and ensure that those who were responsible with takeaways knew it and what it was specifically so that everybody heard the same thing the same way. When you’re in meetings that are super productive and are organized, well, everything rises from a productivity perspective. Hopefully, these tips helped you and you’re encouraged. The Transcend group is constantly looking for ways to make you as an executive, more powerful, more productive, and more fulfilled.
Coaching affords even the strongest leaders their greatest opportunity for personal and professional growth. My purpose is to leverage my years of executive experience and leadership across multiple business areas to inspire my clients to lean into their strengths, identify limiting behaviors and pursue transformational growth that will produce positive, tangible results for the organization.
