The Art of Better Meetings
This month’s book club was focused on The Art of Gathering: How We Meet & Why It Matters by Priya Parker. Filled with examples of how to make conferences, baby showers, and dinner parties better, Parker’s book left me wondering how to leverage the power of gatherings to make day-to-day work meetings more productive and perhaps even enjoyable.
We invest in bringing people together to (ideally) realize the power of collaboration and collective information sharing. However, our meetings often don’t deliver on that promise.
Parker outlines how the power of the collective can be harnessed through planning, clear intentions, and strong facilitation. My takeaway is that Parker’s tips when applied to the workplace ultimately boil down to basic meeting hygiene — have a meeting owner who sets and follows an agenda.
The meeting purpose (why we’re meeting) determines the who, where, when, and how of the agenda. For all recurring meetings, perform an audit of each’s purpose and share with the team to clarify why you’re meeting. Purpose can also be clarified in-the-moment by asking, “I think we originally set this meeting for [x] purpose… is that still true?”
Meeting leadership is required to engage all participants in achieving the purpose. If not taking on this responsibility yourself, you can set expectations for others to lead. When handing over meeting ownership to one of my direct reports, I outlined what I’d done to lead and asked what was needed for them to step into that responsibility. In the moment, you can promote equality and enforce leadership by naming interruptions and calling on those who were interrupted to share.
Meeting rules allow everyone to join on a level playing field. While assumptions are unspoken expectations that create disparity between those “in the know” and those who aren’t, rules level the playing field by making expectations explicit. Rules are easily established during planning by noting in the invitation “this will be a cameras-on meeting” or a “this is a no cell phone zone”. In-the-moment challenging or naming assumptions can be as simple as asking folks to explain acronyms that not everyone knows.
Since meeting hygiene is something many of us have already been taught, it seems that a lack of good meetings isn’t from a lack of information, so I encourage you to consider what’s getting in the way?