At 26, I’ve had jobs at a handful of different organizations already. Which means I’ve spent a lot of time in meetings.

Pointless meetings.

Meetings where someone drones on and on.

Meetings that could have been an email.

And meetings that I had no idea how to lead.

But no one ever teaches us how to lead meetings. In fact, 75% of employees have never been trained on how to properly run a meeting. We all just learn from our manager, who learned from their manager, who also learned from their manager. So we’re all a bunch of meeting “disfunctionists”.

…

We’ve all experienced a bad meeting. Probably more often than we’d like to admit.

But more than just our personal experiences, the data says it all…

• 220 million meetings are held in US businesses each year
• Meetings compose 15% of teams’ collective time
• Executives consider 67% of meetings a failure
• $37 billion is wasted annually in unproductive meetings
• Middle managers spend 35% of their time in meetings, and senior managers spend 50% of their time in meetings
• Meeting participants believe that 33% of meeting time is typically unproductive
• 63% of all meetings conducted in America do not use meeting agendas
• …