Why Meetings Go Wrong
I asked my friend on Friday how many boring meetings he would like to attend a week, he considered for about 5 second and then said, “Uh, none?”
You can either read this blog or watch it!
Today I cover the three reasons why meetings are boring, the third one will shock you!!
People don’t know why they are meeting
People don’t know how to run a meeting
People have no self respect
Why do we run meetings?
To get alignment
To motivate
To inspire
To gain understanding of another human’s point of view
What about some bad reasons?
My boss told me to
I guess it's a good idea to get some folks in a room and hash things out
A client came to the office so we had a meeting
People don’t know how to run a meeting. There are no MBAs specializing in running meetings! There aren’t even classes on it. People may not have seen a good meeting before, so they won't know they are propagating failure onwards. Because meetings have such a bad reputation, a lot of people don’t know they can be the highlight of work life. Things like agendas, timing, and action items might seem like unnecessary extras on top of an already unnecessary evil. Why complicate things?
Organizing a meeting is a craft which we who are in Toastmasters have to learn. As Toastmaster we quickly realize that the agenda is our saving grace. We can refer to it and know if we are ahead or behind schedule. We have a team who help us. We are so thankful for delegation. We have an evaluator who tells us how we can make the meeting better. Just taking these four tips to run a good meeting back to our offices would make all our lives better.
The third reason why meetings are bad is because we don’t have enough self respect.
This shows up as not respecting our time. If we respected our time we would demand meeting facilitators to run good meetings. We would in the best possible way give helpful respectful feedback to our coworkers, bosses, team members to help them to run better meetings. Use the format: Something specific they are doing well, something specific to improve the meeting next time.
In conclusion, let's all own bad meetings and work to make them better.
