In pretty much any professional context, you will have to have meetings. You will have to join forces with other human beings on occasion to make forward progress on tasks and projects.
People hate that, and it’s perfectly understandable.
“Meeting” is such a dirty word for so many professionals, but I get it. Meetings aren’t the problem – bad meetings are the problem. And most of them are bad!
It always surprises me a little that professional meetings are so bad. Why should it surprise me? Well, because good meeting culture – proper processes for how, when, why to have meetings, who to involve, etc. – is a 10x force multiplier for effectiveness, engagement, productivity, and all that great stuff, while bad meeting culture is like trying to take off in a snowstorm. But even more than the obvious benefits is the fact that it’s not very hard to invest in getting your meeting culture to “great,” not just good!
Like anything, running good meetings is a skill. And like any skill, some people are really good at it. Because many people don’t realize that meeting culture has the impact that it does, those skilled facilitators are often languishing. But here’s the beauty of it: You don’t need any particular subject matter expertise to run an incredibly effective meeting on a subject. So a very small number of people with the right skill could support an entire organization.
We recognize this, broadly, for a lot of other skills. Most people in business accept that if you want an effective talent pipeline for your company, you need people who are skilled at recruiting and talent development, not subject matter experts on the divisions they’re hiring for. Some familiarity helps, but the core skill for what they’re doing is far more important. (A very skilled recruiter who knows just a little bit about engineering will be far more effective at hiring engineers than a very skilled engineer who knows just a little bit about recruiting.) Same for sales, marketing, HR, etc. We recognize that those skills are amplifiers, creating the pathways for the core of any business to function at its best level.
But not every organization has caught on to “Meeting Facilitation” as a similar skill. Being able to run meetings is just lumped in with “general leadership” and managerial skills (which are already woefully under-invested in by most organizations). There’s no “Meetings Department” the way there is for Sales, HR, Marketing, etc.
But imagine if there was!
Imagine if any time you needed to get some group collaboration and work done on an ongoing project, there was a skilled facilitator on your staff who could design and distribute an agenda in advance, manage the logistics of invites and scheduling, guide the discussion productively and arbitrate disagreements, point out bias or fallacies in thinking while the meeting was taking place, take and distribute accurate and effective notes, create follow-up action items and hold people accountable to them, ensure that everyone in attendance can actually helpfully contribute and that only those who can actually helpfully contribute are in attendance, and manage a host of other aspects of good meeting culture?
Did you maybe not realize just how much goes into truly great meeting culture? Well, that’s my point now, isn’t it?
The Opportunity Machine 