What questions are your meetings trying to answer? How many meetings have become tired, stale, past their sell by date. Think about it.
What questions are your current meetings answering? – General, bland stuff that leads to zero insight, zero change? What happened last week in marketing? What happened in sales? Are you really just turning up for that Monday sales meeting because that’s what you do on a Monday morning?
Where is the innovation? Markets change at 100mph, competitors emerge from nowhere, staff turn off, systems stop working.
Questions need to be constantly reviewed for relevance along with the reason for the meeting. You are allowed to change the questions. You need to change the questions. Articulating the questions you need to answer leads to:
- Shorter meetings
- Less attendees
- New meetings that are needed
- More frequent meetings
- Less frequent meetings
- Meetings that are aligned with your big goals
- Meetings that are more fun
- Meetings that move the ball forward
- Much smaller agenda items
- Shorter answers by attendees
This one’s great. Spot on. I’m going to use it to jazz up my sales meeting this morning. Like a lot of sales meetings it’s a constant battle to get sales people to give you just the valuable part of the update without going into all the historical ‘noise’ that often hides lack of actual progress.
I think sharing the objective of making the meeting slicker, punchier, shorter, yet more valuable will help with that. Especially if we introduce some fun.
Keep you posted!
Tim
Thanks Tim. We spend so much time in meetings let’s make them shorter and more productive.