Impactful Meetings

Meetings are a part of work life for most of us.  However, all too often they are also one of our largest frustrations.  But why?  Working with people, whilst sometimes challenging is generally preferred to the opposite - working in complete isolation with little or no interaction with other people.

There is much written about meeting effectiveness online.  In true VFS fashion, we have digested much of this, have been trained in numerous fads and  ideas and, with many years of experience available to us, have formed a distilled view of the topic.

Below we summarise a few key points:

• Consider meetings to simply be a meeting of people for a specific purpose, then consider how they can be run to maximise their impact.

• Effective meetings achieve that purpose.

• Effective & Efficient meetings achieve its purpose with the minimum amount of time and effort.

• You may or may not be contributing - this is not necessarily related to the value of the meeting:

  • It's easy to view some meetings a waste of time without considering the big picture - the value of shared knowledge;

  • You may be creating value for others by contributing knowledge & information;

  • You may gain new knowledge that will help you share this with others and/or make more informed decisions;

... after all, knowledge is the bottleneck, it's important to share it.

• It's often helpful to clarify the type of meeting and thus its primary purpose by thinking about purpose sitting somewhere on the spectrum from Information Sharing to Decision Making.

• But also, meetings can enable people to build rapport and grow trusting relationships.

Related pages:

• Making Better Decisions

• Knowledge is the Bottleneck

• Trust

• Psychological Safety

• Alignment