How to STOP pointless meetings 

If I were about to walk into a lamp post, what advice would you give me? I imagine…

"Stop"

And you'd be right.  Why would anyone keep going on a path which was only going to get more painful?

Which brings me onto meetings…

Some of those meeting you attend will be pointless, useless and mind-numbing wastes of time. To keep going on this path will only make things more painful. Meetings are often seen as an essential element of working in a company or organisation, but why are they so prevalent in todays' working environment. 

"Stop"

And, by this, I mean meetings that…

• Add nothing to the business – then stop having them
• Add nothing to you – then stop attending them
• Include people who can't contribute – then stop inviting them
• Substitute discussion for decision-making – stop them being an excuse for inaction
• Are too long – stop putting an hour if you don’t need it, if it can be done in 5 minutes
• Always start late – stop starting them late! It's disrespectful of everyone's time
• Nobody has done the prep for – stop the meeting, and say you’ll re-convene when people have done the necessary pre-work. Anything else will waste everyone's time

Sounds easy, but it is not. People often see this type of advice as challenging how companies operate, breaking the  Comfort Zone is often seen as tacking a great taboo. Meetings are seen as a management function, a control mechanism, and above all as a core element of business communication. Meetings are often a default mechanism, rather than a productive communication tool. Habits are difficult to break, the key challenge in breaking them is how to replace them with mass physical (of Zoom) communication with something that looks familiar and is seen to engage (even if it does not) with all levels of the organisation.   

Classically a senior manager calls the meeting, runs the meeting, talks the entire meeting and looks for nodding heads, produces the meeting minutes and tells other senior management that it was successful. Engagement is self-certificated self-rewarding and there is often no understanding of its real impact upon the other attendees.

Action point

List the bullet points above.

And how many of them happened and impacted upon you?  Definitely more than none!

Identify better ways of communicating with your colleagues and make a plan to try these to replace pointless meetings. 

Strategy: The Leader's Role by Richard Gourlay

Strategy The Leader's Role by Richard Gourlay

Strategy The Leader's Role is a book which brings together courses all the key tools which a leader needs to use to create a successful business strategy. 

These tools are carefully explained, with step-by-step guides as to what and how to develop your business strategy. 

Each step builds upon one another enabling the leaders to develop a comprehensive business strategy to lead your business successfully.

The Importance of Strategy

The leader is the person ultimately in charge of defining the corporate goals of any organisation. It is the one role which a leader cannot delegate.  Strategy is the course to take to achieve your organisation goals. 

Without a strategy any organisation drifts aimlessly within its market, loosing its position and its customers. A clear set of goals allows a strategy  to be developed to achieve those goals, enabling the organisation to focus, find its direction and pull together towards those goals. 

Strategy: The Leader's Role by Richard Gourlay, provides both the hard tools to assess and develop your goals and strategy and the soft tools which enables leader's to successfully implement those strategic shifts within their organisation.     

Leading From the Front

It is difficult to lead if you don't know where you are going and in this book, Richard Gourlay explains how to use key tools and concepts to assess your market and define your goals and set your direction of travel. How to weed out the noise which often drowns the clarity of thinking which leader's need to see where markets are going and enables them to define their vision for their organisation. 

Leading from the front can only happen if a leader is confident of where they are going and why they are taking that route. This book provides that clarity of purpose for leaders to assess and understand how to define what matters form what does not so that they can step up and out and lead from teh front.

Strategy: The Leader's Role 

In Strategy: The Leader's Role each step in building your vision, goals and strategy is explained with relevant tools and aids to enable you to develop your own unique strategy to fit you and your organisations circumstances. 

From assessing your core competancies as an organisation through to understanding where your market (s) are going. Strategy the Leader's Role explains in step by step chapters how to undertake your own assessment with models an examples of how others have achieved their strategy.

Tools include external market assessments well as internal market assessment tools to create strategic options. How to assess your organisational capability as well as how to use theses to create a strategic advantage. 

To buy this business book, just click the image or the link below:-    

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