After 9,000 hours of meetings over six years, the speaker breaks down one formula: prepare by gathering all background information and inviting the right decision-makers and contributors, then structure it with a clear leader, speaking order, and agenda. Those three elements determine whether a meeting actually works.
Running almost 9,000 hours of meetings in the last 6 years, here's what I've learned on how to make a good meeting. You need structure times preparation. Preparation is information and people. Information is, do I know all of the things everybody else knows before I get on this meeting so that I can make decisions? Usually when you're getting on a meeting, it's to move something forward, but if you don't have all the background information, you can't move something forward. The people— do I have the decision makers and do I have the contributors? Decision makers are the people that are going to say, yes, we can do what you've decided we are going to do in this meeting. We have the authority to make decisions in the company. Contributors are the people who are saying, this is what I'm seeing, here's the feedback from the clients. I'm the one in this every day to provide the decision makers with the information they can make a good decision. Now the structure piece is who's going to talk, who's going to lead the meeting, and what are we going to talk about. And so if you know who's going to talk, you know who's going to lead the meeting, you know what we're going to talk about, you have all the right people in the room with all the right knowledge, there's no way that this meeting isn't going to be effective.
