At the core of every successful company are productive and effective team meetings. There are likely very few people in the world who love meetings, but successful meetings are a necessity for business. How are team members supposed to collaborate, brainstorm, make group decisions, or build a company’s culture without them? Also, I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s ever worked with people who hold meetings to plan their meetings.
Meetings can have a very positive impact on a company’s direction if decisions are being made, to-do list items are being ticked off, and no time is wasted. Unfortunately the majority of meetings don’t go that way. According to a report by the Harvard Business Review, one company they analyzed spent 300,000 man hours supporting a weekly executive committee meeting. That’s completely ridiculous.
The world’s top CEOs know the importance of successful meetings. They have companies to run and their teams have jobs to do. Here are just a few key pieces of advice from top executives about how they get the most out of their precious meeting time.
- Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook) – Set an agenda and stick to it.
- Gary Vaynerchuk (Vaynermedia, Wine Library) – Cut meeting times in half.
- Jeff Weiner (LinkedIn) – Start with wins.
- Marissa Mayer (Yahoo!) – Back up decisions with data.
- Larry Page (Google) – Don’t let meetings bottleneck work.
These tips and the rest illustrated in this infographic by Wrike can help your team get more done during meetings while cutting down the amount of time spent in them.
