5 Meeting Effectiveness Killers

This blog post is the fourth in a five-part series that covers the top 5 meeting killers that are the root causes of most ineffective meetings that we all are forced to suffer through. By combating these 5 meeting killers you can realize tremendous improvements in your meeting effectiveness and reduce the amount of time that you and your coworkers spend in meetings.

Implementing a Business Meeting Process

Cultural norms for conducting meetings vary among industries and organizations, but a solid meeting process is vital for excellent meeting performance. Unfortunately few organizations have such a process.

Imagine a major highway with no lines on the road and no posted signs on the shoulder. Now imagine a daily commute on this road with tens of thousands of other drivers who were never taught how to drive. How effectively would the traffic flow? How is this any different from the meeting process in most organizations? The inadequate process from under-equipped leaders is a meeting killer.

Are you Trained to run Effective Business Meetings?

In our experience, the meeting process is generally left to the discretion of the individual meeting leader, rather than following a proven organizational process. Yet most business professionals have never received formal training about how to plan and run effective meetings. In a recent survey of our users, fewer than ten percent have ever received training on how to conduct effective business meetings.

A recent Microsoft survey reports that there are 11 million meetings in the US each day. That is 3 Billion meetings per year. Imagine the enormous amount of time invested in these meetings each day, yet fewer than 10 percent of professionals ever receive training on how to conduct effective business meetings. This would not be tolerated in any other area of your business. Don’t tolerate it in meetings either. It is a waste of precious human capital and it has a huge impact on overall company productivity and results.

 

If you would like to dive further into running fewer, faster, more focused meetings consider our Powerfully Simple Meetings Workshop.

Does your organization have a standardized process for running meetings?  Have you ever received formal meeting training?  Leave us a comment below and let us know.

 

Continue this series 5 Meeting Killers – #5 Insufficient Data