Let's meet... to dinner!

You are in good mood or you just want to meet with friends, so you send an email to 20 contacts in order to meet and dinner. Let me tell you how it goes... the usual candidates (who will always attend, no matter the reason) will reply first. If someone is too close to you, it will also do a quick reply to agree on meeting. The rest will split between spectators (they read the email but do not care to answer) and the busy adults (they can't check their email due to work, wife/husband, kids, sick relative, else). After 10 emails on the thread, the meeting seems a good idea, but the first set of problems start to appear. Timing (day and hour) is random between potential attendants, meeting place is another concern, either someone lives too far or has something to do before/after, so suggests to meet close to where it is convenient to him/her. Add another person who was the same requirement and your meeting is starting to dissolve already.

Let's say all the early attendants agree on timing (miracles happen) and place. This is looking perfect till one of the spectators (who did not dare to comment and/or read till now) replies back and asks to meet somewhere else or at another hour... and there we go again.

Lesson learned, next time you need to set a place, a day and hour, and you won’t have to deal with those problems, at the risk of looking like a dictator… unless you will pay for the full bill, then you are just a great pal.

In a company, this may not happen exactly as your failed dinner, but it will be a pain in the neck anyways. Try meeting with 20 people from different teams and you will likely get reschedules, rejects and so on. One of the biggest failures we make is not communicating the reason of the meeting (and I'm not even asking for an agenda, that would be awesome). It's like getting invited to a meeting in real life and do not know how to dress. Is it a party? A funeral? Next mistake is related to people we invite, if someone is not required, be good enough to mark them as optional on the invite. People that is marked as required need to know what is expected from them, an agenda may be useful but sometimes even dropping questions that will need an answer during the meeting may help.

And before hitting send on the invite... is it really important to meet? Be honest with yourself, a useless meeting may sound a minor nuisance but eventually people will ignore your requests because you suck as a chairman. So, think for a minute before creating a meeting, and try to check if your concern may be actually solved with a chat conversation, an email thread or even a phone call.

Trust me, once people know you respect their time, they will attend to your meetings and be useful. Even better, you can actually organize a dinner later with them to celebrate the blessing of useful meetings ;) (the only concern would be who pays the bill).