Four Ways to Be More Effective in Meetings

If you call a meeting, pleasetry sending an agenda ahead of time.

If you don’t think you’rereally needed in a meeting, politely ask to be excused.

Worth a read:

Four Ways to Be More Effective in Meetings

Highlights for me:

·“It was reallysad the amount of time we spent not doing work, but doing work about work,” hesaid. “Even if a 30-minute meeting seems innocuous, context-switching is sohard, and it’s hard to get back into the rhythm of things.”

·Doing away withmeetings altogether would be counterproductive, so the trick is to get more outof the meetings you attend.

·After accepting ameeting invitation, the first thing you should always do isask for an

agenda well in advance. Your best tool for doing well in meetings is relentlesspreparation, and studying the agenda will help you plot the moments for yourcontributions…

·Pointing outobvious but uncomfortable truths is never easy, but it is nearly impossible ina setting with your peers and colleagues. But that is all the more reason to gofor it. “People bumping up against each other is what helps us not just improveour work product but also ourselves as human beings,” Ms. Scott said, notingthe often-cited “obligation to dissent” at McKinsey & Company, the renownedmanagement consulting firm. The benefits here often far outweigh the risks,even if your workplace has not embraced dissent as a necessary tool forimprovement. If something does not feel right to you, odds are it is not justyou.

·With such apremium placed on group efforts, many organizations have reached one of twopoints, or both: A culture in which meeting invitations are seen as a sign ofone’s prestige and importance, and collaboration happening for the sake ofcollaborating, a.k.a. collaboration overload. The first step to recovery is,obviously, going to fewer meetings. That is easy for managers, but what abouttheir employees? The most tactful technique, experts said, is to acknowledgethe invitation and express your appreciation, then politely explain that youare unclear about how your presence will add anything and suggest that you skipit. Frame your absence as an opportunity for others to add more to the meeting.Another, more radical, choice: Designate one day of the week in which you

won’t attend a single meeting. If you’re lucky enough to be in a positionwhere you can decline meetings en masse, give it a shot. Even just oneinterruption-free day of the week can do wonders for your productivity.