Welcome to Brilliant Meetings
You’ve probably picked up this book because you are continually frustrated by bad meeting experiences, and you want to begin a process for positive change. Like you, so many people – meeting participants irrespective of job level, culture or size of organisation – have low expectations of meetings simply because of repeated exposure to bad meetings.
If statistics were needed to prove how we feel about ineffective meetings, then research carried out in September 2008 on behalf of VisitBritain revealed that: ‘Three in ten meetings are a waste of time, costing UK businesses a staggering £27.5 billion a year in wasted workforce hours’.
‘The average working person spends eight working weeks per year in meetings – almost double a typical holiday allowance – and 29 per cent of these meetings were considered unproductive.’1
What is a meeting?
It is a gathering of individuals collaborating with the interests of the organisation at its core, for a scheduled amount of time.
What is a Brilliant Meeting?
It is the whole meeting experience; before during and after the physical or virtual gathering takes place, where the desired learn, share, create outcomes are achieved.
The recipe for a Brilliant Meeting.
All good recipes require the ingredients to be correctly procured and prepared, yet it is only when they are blended with the necessary knowledge and skills of the chef that the finished dish is a culinary success. In exactly the same way, participation, preparation and leadership are the ingredients that need combining in the right quantities to result in a Brilliant Meeting.
The ingredients for a Brilliant Meeting.
- Completed preparation
- Logistics – why, who, when, where, what
- Fully prepared agenda
- Ground rules – a common set of rules everyone abides by
- Start on time
- Focus on required outcomes
- Effective contributions and participation
- Presentations designed to stimulate and achieve meeting outcomes
- Finish on time
- ‘Follow-up actions’ assigned, understood and completed
The skills needed for a Brilliant Meeting
- The ability to ‘choose your attitude’
- Construction and delivery of your ‘Elevator Pitch’
- Making best use of available meeting resources and technologies
- Delivery of engaging presentations
- The correct use of questioning techniques
What Brilliant Meetings will do for you
- Produce fewer, shorter meetings
- Result in meetings that fully achieve their objectives
- Provide opportunities to showcase professional abilities and raise personal profiles
- Position meetings as an integral and important part of your job role
- Increase motivation through productive, effective meetings
How to use this Brilliant Meetings book
Brilliant Meetings is divided into four sections aimed at: Meeting Participants, Meeting Organisers, Meeting Leaders and the Organisation as a whole.
Each section is filled with templates, examples, tips, tricks and techniques aimed at improving the meeting experience.
The individual sections are easy to reference, providing you with exactly the information you need, when you need it.
How you can achieve a Brilliant Meeting
- Organising, participating and leading successful meetings are everyday requirements in business life, and they are within your reach if you follow the guidelines and advice offered in this book
- Promote the Brilliant Meetings ethos to your colleagues.
- Log on to www.meetingexpert.co.uk for continually updated material, templates, training, ideas etc.
Brilliant Meetings is a commonsense, practical and workable approach, designed to ensure that all meetings are:
- held for the right reasons;
- correctly prepared for;
- sufficiently documented;
- effective and productive.
Brilliant Meetings = more effective meetings
1 This research, commissioned on behalf of VisitBritain, was carried out by Opinium Research LLP on an online poll of 2,226 British adults between 29 August and 2 September 2008.