5 Simple Rules for Running Effective Meetings

How many times have you been in meetings and thought to yourself, this meeting sucks? Cameron Harrell, founder of the COO alliance, says meetings suck. You hear it all the time. It's the one thing that almost everyone in business can agree on. Except it's not actually true. Meetings don't suck. We suck at running meetings. When done right, meetings not only work, they make people and companies better. World renowned business expert and growth guru Cameron Herold is going to show you how easy it is to have focused time, effective meetings to help you and and your company soar. When he's done, you'll be able to easily turn meetings that suck into meetings that work.

Who here has been to a meeting before? Who here has led meetings before? Right. The reality is that meetings don't suck. We suck at running meetings. I've been coaching CEOs around the world for nine years and what I've uncovered is we've just never really had the proper training to actually know how to run meetings. So another quick show of hands. Who here has had at least an hour's training on on how to run effective meetings? About five of you. That's the problem. Who here has trained all their employees on how to attend meetings or run meetings? See, the problem really isn't that we don't know how to or that meetings suck. It's that we're not very good at it. We would never send any of our kids to little league baseball without teaching them how to hold a bat, throw a ball and catch a ball. We'd never set them up for that failure. And yet we set our employees up for the failure of attending meetings or running meetings without giving them the proper skillset. So I'm going to give you a crash course running meetings. Number one, every meeting has to have a clearer purpose. So when you're booking a meeting, asking people to attend, in the notes section, one sentence, why are we coming? Every meeting can have a maximum of three outcomes. What are the three things we're going to get done in the meeting? List them in order and if you have more than three, book a separate meeting for that, but condense it to covering the main three things. Every meeting has to have an agenda and allow your employees to say no agenda, no attenda. Like if it doesn't, tell me in the notes section what we're covering, in what order and how many minutes on each agenda item. Why should I show up for the meeting in the first place? Everything has to start on time. Your meetings have to start on time. When you set a time, you need to start now. The reason people show up late for meetings isn't because of disrespect. It's not because they're too busy. It's because everything in our calendar is stacked up back to back. Our phone calls and our meetings are all stacked up. If we finish something at 3 o', clock, of course we're late for the 3 o' clock phone call because it starts right as the other one finished. So what I want to do is finish everything five minutes early. But before I do that, I actually want to set an expectation that if you don't show up five minutes early, you're late. You would never, if you were an Olympic athlete, show up for the start of your swim race right as the gun's going off. If you had an 8 o' clock start, can you imagine running out on the pool deck for your 8 o' clock race or to the start of a 100 meter relay? You'd have to show up a little bit early to be prepared. So teach your employees that if they show up saying, sorry, I'm late, what they're really saying is, f you, I'm selfish, I disrespect you, my time's more important. That's really what sorry I'm late actually means. If you want to show respect, then show up early and be prepared. But the only way you can do that is by finishing everything five minutes early. So just teach your employees that every phone call and every meeting stops five minutes prior to the scheduled ending time. Book all your meetings for half the time. You first think about booking them for. If you're going to book it for an hour, book it for 30 minutes. If you're thinking about getting together for a full day, book it for half a day. It's like a quickie. You can get it done in less time if you have to book your meetings the same way. It's like Parkinson's law. Everything expands to fill the space that we give it. So just give it less time. You need three roles being played in every a moderator, a timekeeper, and a parking lot. The moderator just makes sure that we stay on track. The timekeeper makes sure that you hit each agenda item on the time that you're supposed to be allocating for it. And the parking lot is a place you write up all the good ideas that you want to talk about, but you cover them later. So at least you stay on track for the agenda that you're on. There's only three styles of communication that happen during any meeting. There's Infoshare creative discussion and consensus decision. So InfoShare is information being shared that's either top down, bottom up, or laterally. So what you want to do in your agenda is show what are we covering, in what order, in how many minutes on each agenda item, and then show the communication style for each agenda item. That way people know if they're just supposed to show up and listen or contribute ideas, or if we're actually going to be creating consensus and making a decision at the end. The reason we want to have meetings is to avoid miscommunication. I often hear people saying, well, we don't need meetings because we send email. Put your hand up if you send a lot of emails or text messages, all of us, I want everyone to look at the screen, either in the front or the back of the room and I want you to read this sentence out loud and put the emphasis on the first word. Go ahead. Okay, do it again. Read it as a group. Put the Empticism on the second word. Do it again. Put the emphasis on the third word. Let's try the fourth word. Let's do it with the fifth word. Let's do it with the sixth word. So that's a six word sentence that means six completely different things depending on where you put the intonation. And that's in the language that we all speak as our first language. The reason that we have so many problems in our companies is we don't have enough meetings. We don't have proper meetings, we don't have highly functioning meetings. And we've never trained our employees on how to attend them or how to lead them. So we're not allowed to say meetings suck anymore. When we realize that meetings actually don't suck, we suck at running meetings. You can have meetings virtually using conference platforms like Zoom that are free. You can have them in person, but you need to have them. The solution to it is that kind of a crash course. I'm not trying to sell copies of the book. I could be damned. If you buy it, I'll send it to you for free if you want to read it. Kindle versions. But you need to stop saying meetings suck when we have a solution to fix them.