Boring Meetings Suck: Get More Out of Your Meetings, or Get Out of More Meetings

Your Preparation Sucks

No doubt you've stepped into a meeting and quickly learned (as if you couldn't tell by the communication you received) that it has no structure or stated goal to accomplish. It's one of those “I-just-thought-we-could-all-talk-about-it” proceedings, or it's a meeting that leads to scheduling another meeting. On top of it all, you stew while the meeting host fumbles to gather everyone's attention, then loses control to Comic Carl and Sidewinder Sam, who bring up crazy ideas and delay the inevitable break from this monolithic meeting style.

It's the type of meeting you don't have to prepare for and can show up for anytime you want. For those people who don't care about their time or productivity, it actually provides welcome intrusions to their busy week. What a great way to burn away productive hours! Of course, if enabling team members to engage socially is the intended result, well then carry on.

So much of the value of any meeting, though, can be achieved before the meeting event starts. It's up to the facilitators to plan and prepare a meeting or to pay the price of what can happen when they don't. Chances are, you can relate to occurrences like these:

• Attendees become disgruntled because of lack of focus and process.
• Attendees resolve they won't come back to this facilitator's meetings.
• Attendees bring nothing to the table in terms of ideas, content, or questions … and don't participate in any way.
• Attendees vote with their feet. (Yup, they just walk ...