I’ve often said that meetings are like the pigeons in my office – there are too many of them and some of them make me cry.
In this age of remote working, you better believe that running effective meetings is a priority for companies big and small. Everyone has a philosophy for the ideal meeting: “Keep them short”, “Everybody must stand,” etc. Those may work for some, but as you can imagine, I have my own ways of running a meeting. Without further ado, I present you my 10 rules to make sure that meetings are tolerable (to me).
- Nobody should be late but me.
- Don’t feel obliged to let someone finish their sentence.
- Feel free to zone out periodically, but demand that someone catch you up when you start paying attention again.
- On video calls, I don’t need to be on mute – that’s for other people.
- Can someone bring me an ashtray please?
- 2 to 3 hour meetings without a break? I’m fine with it, especially if you aren’t.
- “Sorry, I wasn’t listening” is a totally legitimate thing (for me) to say.
- You have another commitment just after this? Let me improvise a long speech then.
- I can justify anything, including your disagreement with me.
- Someone please write a summary of this meeting that I won’t read.
Everyone and their mother has ideas to run better meetings. I suppose that some of these ideas can co-exist, but I’m quite partial to my own. After all, I’ve been running meetings since I was a young executive in my mother’s womb, and I should let you know that the birth went exactly as planned, on time and on schedule, largely because of my 10 rules.
Gymglish CEO Todd Fakerton
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