33 Tips for Leading Better Meetings
How to become a meeting maestro
The word “meeting” evokes frustration and hatred in the minds of many employees.
Poorly conducted meetings sap time and energy that could be spent doing other things, which is why meetings are the favoured whipping boy of many businesspeople.
Software company Atlassian recently published these statistics about meetings:
- 31 hours/month spent by the average employee on unproductive meetings
- $37 billion/year spent on unproductive meetings across the U.S.
- 73% of employees did other work in meetings
- 39% of employees slept during meetings
And yet, a well-conducted meeting can save time, provide clarity, and even alter the direction of a team or company. The key is not to avoid meetings, but to get better at conducting them.
I’ve had the chance to conduct hundreds of meetings over the past decade: strategic planning meetings, team retrospectives, iteration planning meetings, weekly team meetings, and many others. Along the way, I’ve made many of the classic meeting mistakes but also learned a number of powerful lessons.
Here are 33 things I’ve learned about how to conduct effective meetings.
