How to Make Your Meetings Not to Be Missed

Reach a stellar meeting engagement when you focus on respect

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

When you get invited to a meeting, do you make a judgment in advance whether the meeting will be productive, efficient, useful? Do you ever get those premonitions that a particular meeting will be a waste of time — just as the invite hits your inbox? And if yes, why?

In my experience, most of the time it depends on the meeting organizer, not on the title or agenda. Once you know the person and how well (or how badly) their meetings usually go, you will start to make predictions. With each good or bad experience, your expectations will cement in.

If I were to choose only one value that every meeting organizer needs to apply consistently — my choice would be respect.

How you decide whether a meeting is needed, how you prepare and how you conduct the meeting needs to be based on respect for the time and effort of those that you invite to collaborate and contribute.

This article recaps some fundamental steps to a successful meeting, grounded in respect.

If everyone who invites me to a meeting followed these, I would never grumble again.

1. Be sure you need the meeting