In these next few posts as we enter 2025, I want to share career-changing (maybe even life-changing) skills. I say life-changing because being good at these things can eliminate a whole lot of unnecessary pain and suffering. You will be a happier, more productive, and less stressed human being if you master:

1. How to have the best (and fewest) meetings of your life

2. How to make feedback easy and impactful

3. How to excel with data

4. How to think more creatively

5. How to Sell Yourself & Your Ideas

(that last one is a course I’m teaching on Maven.)

More to come, but that is the roadmap ahead of us for the time being.

How to have the best meetings of your life

In the US alone, we waste about $37 billion a year on ineffective meetings. I personally believe that this number is misleading. The true cost of bad meetings is probably 10X this, maybe more, based on the fact that even “effective” meetings so often lead to strategies, decisions, and action that falls woefully short of what could have been.

In terms of raw value, there are very few things more important than being great at meetings. It’s shockingly common for people to underestimate the true cost of bad meetings, and in doing so, they sacrifice so much potential while opening the door to so much waste and error.

The simple truth is this: if your team is not great at meetings, you won’t operate anywhere near your full potential. You will move slowly, make poorer decisions, and make more preventable mistakes. People on your team will dislike each other more, people will be hesitant to speak up and share critical information, and when they do, they’ll be shot down and berated. And after suffering inefficient, unintelligent, or needlessly-hostile meetings, people will become frustrated, leading to ambivalence, disengagement, and turnover.

This isn’t some overly-dramatic depiction of meetings. This is raw, observable reality that you probably live every day.

How people cannot see that bad vs. good meetings change the entire game is beyond me. People treat meetings as if they are some casual necessity and basic habit of the business operation that by-default goes well enough. Huh? How is that opinion even remotely viable? What evidence is there that meetings are of middling importance or that they by-default go well? None whatsoever.

Meetings are the platform for nearly all critical discussion and decision making, and they are actually highly-unlikely to be efficient, intelligent, aligned, cooperative, or actionable. They are something to take very seriously and be highly-skilled at, and anyone can learn to be a world class facilitator and contributor in meetings.

Yet sadly, most teams are terrible at meetings; “terrible” being a fair term because most meetings could easily be ¼ the length and 5x the value, including the meetings people felt were okay or “effective.”

A company practically only has to be good at two things if they want to be a high-performance company: good managers and good meetings. But the statistics show that most companies are actually very bad at both of the most important parts of the whole business, forcing them to fight big headwinds for every inch of progress.

Meetings (and meeting equivalents like robust slack discussions and email threads where ideas and decisions are happening) are the actual medium of a business. This post is going to give you everything you need (both to understand and to do) to go from wherever you are to world class at a skillset that will transform your performance.

Our Agenda

1. Define “meetings” - this might seem dumb, but let’s make sure we are on the same page about the scope of this topic

2. The 9 different types of meetings you have all the time

3. “We have too many meetings” is a wrong, useless, and counterproductive take

4. The Scale of Meeting Skill: Learn the 10 point scale for meeting attendees

5. The step-by-step process for the best meetings

   1. What to do before the meeting

   2. How to open best

   3. How to facilitate best

   4. How to end a meeting best

6. Advanced skills (next post)

   1. Understanding and managing conflict

   2. Pushing and challenging people’s thinking

   3. Using culture as your bodyguard

   4. When to have a big meeting so you can have fewer small meetings

7. Time Design - How to get 20% of every week back (next post)

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