Leading Great Meetings: How to Structure Yours for Success

This was a good book for those just learning how to lead meetings, starting their career, and needing a refreshment on how to lead great meetings.

One summer when my kids were young I loaded them into the car for week at the beach. We had swimsuits and towels, beach toys, a drum of sunscreen, sun hats that would never make it out of the cottage, bicycles on the roof rack, and enough kid snack food for a week. Cranking Don Spencer’s Australian animal songs on the car stereo, we sped south. Then we motored south. Then crept south. By the time we got to southern Rhode Island, we were crawling south, willing the car to just make the cottage, where I could park the kids with grandma and find an emergency room for the car.A lot of us plan meetings like I planned my car vacation. We load up the agenda with everything that people could want to discuss. We invite everyone who could possibly have a view on the topic. We labor over the choice of snack items. (Gluten free? Locally sourced?) But we pay much less attention to the structure of the meeting – the vehicle that will get us to the decisions our business needs.Enter Dr. Richard Lent. Rick has spent a career “under the hood” of meetings. He’s demonstrated many times in his own work that meetings can produce satisfying results even when the meeting topic is contentious and the meeting participants are wary of each other. In Leading Great Meetings, readers learn from Rick’s decades of experience in translating organizational-development knowledge into real-world meeting success in places as varied as his small Massachusetts home-town and major international organizations.This book has many great features, but three stand out for me. This is the first book I’ve read that provides practical, do-able tools for keeping participants engaged in “virtual” meetings even when your organization does not have the newest on-line meeting tools. Tools like dividing meeting responsibilities among participants, visible note taking with free on-line resources to keep options organized and the conversation on-track, “going around the room” to increase participants’ involvement, and even having photos of all participants on-screen, are simple, elegant ways to counter the entropy that ensues (In-box? Facebook?) when participants aren’t face-to-face.Second, the book gives straightforward, practical advice to cure the “time creep” problem that is ubiquitous in meetings and that makes us dislike them. If people dread your meetings because they drag on, that alone is a reason to get Leading Great Meetings.Third, the design and organization of Rick’s book is superb. It succinctly diagnoses most common meeting problems, describes why they happen, and offers a set of tightly curated tools to resolve them. A separate section at the end of the book summarizes the tools with labeled pages that get you instantly to the tool you want.If your meetings are good already, you might dip into Leading Great Meetings for some quick tips to make them great. If they’re more like my vacation vehicle (overstuffed and about to veer off course), this could be the most helpful business book you read all year.

I want to share thoughts and insights reading through a very practical guide: “Leading Great Meetings – how to structure yours for success”. From my Future Search Network friend Rick Lent. In his book he presents tools, structures and stories for planning, conducting and achieving results with your meetings. All meetings have structures that affect how we behave -behaviour follows structure.Reading Rick’s book you learn to control by preparing better. Lack of planning is evocated by the fact we all ‘know’ how to meet. But this often leads to frustrating experiences during meetings. He distinguishes 6 logical planning choices for better preparation:1. Goal: The goal should be a well defined task – Focussed, Actionable, Timely and Timed – (FATT)2. Who to include: consider to include diversity of views3. Design: group size, strangers, outspoken people, sharing presentations4. Reaching decisions (how to build commitment), 5 choices to get a decision:Consensus – everybody truly supports the ideaConsent – everybody truly supports the idea as good enoughCompromise – each person gives up somethingCount (votes) winners and losers – don’t blame me I did not vote for it!Consult – leader just asks input , he decidedHe prefers 1-3 for more horizontal ways of working.5. Time use,6. Meeting space. (use of tables etc.)During the meeting he presents 4 ways to conduct efficiently:1. Sharing responsibility by apllying the 4 roles of self-management.2. Supporting productive conversations – give everyone a chance to speak; respectful listening; avoid defensive behaviours3. Managing time4. Working with conflicts. Provide for small groups sharing of views before whole group discussion.And these are all very relevant for self-managing teams, groups, organizations. Without introducing new rigid rules, as is the risk with applying Holacracy (see my blog : From Top Down Hierarchy to Horizontal Bureaucracy). Rick offers very tangible approaches you can consciously choose. Finally he describes two choices for achieving results with your meetings:- How you build decisions – rather than make – you can use common ground, consensus, multi-voting, ..; focus on areas of agreement- How to follow-up (timing and follow-up questions) have participants be responsible for actions.Rick also presents valuable ideas for virtual meeting management and how to start implementing the changes. He suggests not to share all the different choices one can make – but just apply them and work with what happens. He includes a questionnaire or self-guide as a help to make choices.In my opinion applying straight forward meeting structures and tools will enhance useful experiences which will help to let go of control during a meeting. You can control structures / design / choices – NOT behaviour.

Great understanding on techniques to get the best from your teams and meetings especially if you are new to managerial world really helpful

I bought the book based on the reviews. The book is very repetitive, using all times acronyms.I was definitely expecting a lot more.