Mediocre Meeting Mutiny: Why It's Time To Stop Settling for Tolerable 

Read Time: 4 minutes.

Our standards have dropped so low that our favorite meetings are the ones that get canceled. And if you missed Part 1 last week, I gave you some practical ideas for accelerating that process. 

By giving yourself more space by pruning the useless meetings, you can double your impact on those that remain. 

And those that remain likely come in 3 distinct flavors: 

• One-on-one meetings with your team

• Small group problem-solving or decision-making sessions

• Large group all-hands or town hall meetings

I've already detailed my approach for inverting your one-on-ones, so we don't need to revisit those here. And while I believe you need to make your all-hands great, they're relatively low frequency and highly tied to your culture. 

I want to drill into those core meetings that make your business go. Amazon most accurately describes them as the two pizza meetings (attendance can't be more people than two pizzas can feed).

These 3-7 key participants solving problems or making decisions make or break your team's success.

Why? 

• They reveal the diversity in their collective ideas.

• They show how comfortable people are actively debating.

• They underscore how effectively they realign and fiercely commit.

And you can see - and feel - how successful they are by how they end.

Does the team burst from these meetings collectively energized to win?

Or do the individuals trudge out of the room exhausted and defeated?

Here's how I'd rebuild these meetings to mid-90s Chicago Bulls’ intro energy.

101 - Efficient Execution

Knowing the basics and applying them are very different things. 

The key ingredient for getting the basics right: 

Respect.

Treating everyone's attention as a valuable resource is the best way to show them respect. 

Purpose - What is the singular reason we are meeting? Your test: This meeting is a win if we leave the room, and what is true? Hint: "A bunch of ideas" would not hit the mark. 

Roles - Why is each person in that meeting? Your test: Will the outcome be worse if this person doesn't attend? Hint: "To observe" can be done via recordings and transcripts.

Pre-reads - What shared context can be provided in advance so the time together starts at collaboration? Your test: Does everyone have the same inputs (context and data) that will let them apply logic to create the target output? Hint: "No advance materials" likely means you haven't visualized the meeting well. 

Facilitated - Meetings need deft leadership. When should tangents be explored versus redirected? Your test: Will this exploration change our objective or alter the outcome? Hint: Calibrate your "grip strength" based on a) the criticality of the decision and b) the maturity of the topic. 

Follow-ups - Who is going to do what by when? Your test: The meeting is not over if you can't answer that question. Hint: "If it's not written, it's not real." Send it to confirm, or it never happened. 

Nothing above is ground-breaking. But look back on your meetings the last few weeks and ask yourself how often you went five for five. 

So I'll repeat it: 

Knowing the basics and applying them are very different things. 

Once you're consistently nailing the basics, it's time to shoot higher. 

201 - Engaging Enlightenment

In case no one told you, we're all in the business of "edutainment" (equal parts education and entertainment). 

So when I suggest to executives that they're mailing in their "performance" in meetings, the common pushback I get is: 

"I'm a leader, not an entertainer."

But we don't want to make decisions. We want to make great decisions. We don't want to solve problems. We want to ignite change. 

And our odds are highest when we do this from a "peak state."

To get ourselves into this state, we need to trigger three things: