How to attend fewer meetings (yes really)

But make sure you're in the ones that really count...

I have an exciting piece of news for you today, then a quick story time, before I share my essential tips to help you reduce the number of meetings you attend, without sacrificing your visibility as a leader. We’re jam packed today let’s go!

Exciting news! (Well I think it’s exciting…)

I’m offering one of you a one to one coaching session with me over the next month. We’ll talk for 90 minutes about the goals you want to reach as a new or aspiring leader, and you’ll do some active reflection on what might be stopping you or getting in the way, before I ask you some challenging (but supportive!) questions to get you to commit to an action plan.

In my coaching practice, I offer blocks of three, six or 12 sessions and the first of each three is always 90 mins long. So we can dig deep and kickstart your coaching journey.

There’ll be no extra charge for this session. All I ask is that you are a premium subscriber of Lead with Intention (it’s £5 a month, or £50 for the year) as that’s how I know you’re committed to this leadership thang. And I want to reward a premium subscriber with 90 minutes of my undivided attention as a coach.

I’ll pick someone at random from amongst premium subscribers and contact you on Monday Feb 19th to let you know. If you’d like to take up the session at that point, I’ll book you in!

Story time…

In a senior leadership role I once had, we met as an executive team for some leadership development. We were attempting to get to the heart of why we didn’t feel as if we had enough time to meet all our priorities as a team. As a quick exercise, we mapped out all of the meetings that we had to attend. Per year.

You can imagine the collective gasp of horror when we saw it laid out like that.

We all attended far too many meetings. And we set too many meetings.

If we felt like that, how on earth did the people that worked with us and for us feel?

It was a lightbulb moment.

Meetings. The bane of our corporate life.

One of the most complained about issues for many of us in our corporate careers. (I’ll cover the others soon!)

We seem to have arrived at a point in corporate culture where meetings, once an essential way to make decisions and move things forward, became not just ubiquitous, but pretty useless the majority of the time.

Can you tell I don’t love meetings? I bet you don’t either.

I once went to a meeting where we spent 30 minutes arguing about the purpose of said meeting. We didn’t really get anywhere, yet no-one felt they could leave at that point, so we carried on with a pretty pointless pursuit. And there weren’t even any biscuits on offer… (For my overseas readers, this is a big deal in UK corporate culture…)

Meeting fatigue is real and it's what stops a lot of people feeling satisfied at work because they get to the end of their work day and think:

“Well, all I did was attend ten meetings. What did I actually do or contribute?”

That’s not a good feeling is it? We want to leave work feeling satisfied, fulfilled, confident that we have given our best and made a difference.

So this week, I want you to follow these steps for me and see what happens to your happiness and productivity…

Today’s leadership lesson: how to reduce the number of ineffective meetings in your role