Blog
We welcome comments from anyone on any blog post; we want to generate active, meaningful dialogue about the challenges and opportunities surrounding group meetings, which are clearly the most frequent – and the most frustrating – of all organizational activities. However, we will not approve blatantly commercial comments, and we reserve the right to edit submitted comments to maintain mutual respect and learning, and to remove commercial promotions.
Making Meetings Matter: The First Step
The first step in making your meetings and other conversations matter is to be more intentional about them.
However, because every one of us engages in work-related conversations of all kinds every day, it is highly unrealistic to suggest that you spend time thinking through every conversation before it takes place.
So let’s focus on formal meetings. Every meeting you set up and hold consumes scarce corporate resources – time and money. [continue reading…]
Redefining Leadership for the Digital Age
Are you ready to become a smart meeting leader?
I invite you to join me on Tuesday, April, 26, at 4 PM Eastern time, for a free one-hour online conversation focused on “Redefining Leadership for the Digital Age.”
You can register here:
Registration URL: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/7124403613916859139
Webinar ID: 146-058-459
In this inaugural offering I will identify why a new mindset is essential, describe the “P4+” model of meeting leadership I’ve developed, discuss how it produces meetings that are both productive and popular, and offer practical tips for engaging your meeting participants in creative, constructive conversations. [continue reading…]
Orchestrating Powerful Conversations: Asking Questions
If you accept the idea that a meeting leader’s role is to orchestrate the conversation, or to sense and guide, then pay very close attention to what every participant is saying, and what emotions they are expressing. But listen for understanding, not to judge or evaluate what is being said.
As conversation expert Judith Glaser explains in Conversational Intelligence (link is to Amazon.com), [continue reading…]
Four Questions to Ask About All Those Meetings
I’ve said it many times: meetings are the very heart of the future of work. Meetings are the way knowledge workers learn, communicate, problem-solve, create, share ideas, influence others, and inspire. They are the way work gets done in a world overwhelmed with information. We sort out the wheat from the chaff, we develop new ideas, and we build consensus in meetings. [continue reading…]
Meetings are the Heart of the Future of Work
I was recently interviewed about Making Meetings Matter by Dr. Jac Fitz-Enz (“Interviewing Jim Ware”). In the course of our conversation he asked me why I had moved from my long-term focus on the future of work to something as “mundane” as corporate meetings.
Dr. Jac’s question caught me a bit off guard, but it made me think. [continue reading…]
David Coleman reviews “Making Meetings Matter”
David Coleman, the founder and executive director of Collaborative Strategies, Inc., has just published a highly complimentary review of Making Meetings Matter. It appears on CMSWire.
Here is a brief excerpt:
[continue reading...]Collaboration and telecommunications company Fuze correlated data that shows “15 percent of an organization’s time is spent in meeting.” A Bain report echoed these findings. On average, 11 million meetings took place in the US every day in 2015.