Changing meetings one at a time is like trying to create more sunlight by putting in brighter light bulbs. The most effective way to improve all the meetings in your organization is to do it widely and get everyone involved in making meetings work.
In the 1,000 managers I surveyed, 98% said they would like to spend less time in meetings. The motivation is to make meetings more efficient, people just feel overwhelmed as it is and do not know how to change them. The way to do it is to change all of them. If you only teach a few managers to make meetings more efficient and send them back into an old structure, they are going to be frustrated by the efficiencies in other meeting, and have a hard time getting everyone adopting their new practices. That is why is it is so important to change all meetings and get the tools and understanding into everyone’s hands.
You will get happy people when they realize if they use this approach, they actually will have more hours in their day to work on priority projects and respond to customers. People leave efficient meetings motivated (instead of de-motivated after having wasted time in an inefficient meeting).
It is an organizational change that will have less resistance than almost any other organizational change you can name!
Kotter’s Change Model outlines 8 essential steps of change management:
Replace minutes with user friendly, easy to email docs like the DALI (Log of Decisions, Actions and Information in an easy to read matrix log format).
Agendas drive everything; use goal focused agendas to help people to stay focused & reduce the possibility of tangents.