HBR Guide to Making Every Meeting Matter by Harvard Business Review.
Do you work within an organization that is meeting driven? Sometimes it can seem that every decision regardless of place in a project requires a face to face meeting, in person or online. Many times however results can be addressed via email.
Yet when meetings are indeed the best course of action, this book provides the overlooked simplicity to transform the ‘regular’ meeting (which is often ineffective into very productive working sessions.
This book does in fact address very common challenges employees face. In fact many can say first hand they have experienced meetings that felt made little effort for the amount of time set aside for multiple employees.
There are very valuable lessons to learn that can empower employees to move the needle. If you feel this sounds a bit off, then perhaps you cannot recall how a well planned meeting by anyone well verses in running meetings and controlling the discussions by simply presenting an agenda will leave you wondering why have you not engaged well run meetings all long?
Are you even setting the table ?
The first real insightful leader that managed meetings had a well planned agenda printed for each attendee. This individual really made a statement by actually leaving any meeting where an agenda was not presented. The book is addressing this in the section “Prepare effective agendas” and is not to be missed. It was very impressive to see this develop into a core requirement for meetings that I was assigned to manage. You will find similar ideas and insights from Simon Sinek’s Find Your Why.
In conclusion, while published in 2011 some things rarely change as the fundamental structure of a well planned meeting. This book can empower anyone to learn a number of core objectives including setting the purpose, meeting preparation, and the execution process. Bonus to the comment above: Determine whether a meeting is necessary.