Terrible Advice for Your Weekly Team Meeting

What people really love about coming to meetings is how unproductive they are. bad weekly meetings I don’t know about you but I eagerly check my calendar each morning hoping against hope that YES, I do have a day jam packed full of useless meetings! It’s like Christmas every day…

Want to replicate this feeling of “awesomeness” for your team? Of COURSE you do! Here’s how:

1. Talk meaninglessly about nothing for hours.

The first thing I love about pointless meetings is how the boss just drones on and on and on. I play a little game with myself where I watch the clock tick on the wall and zone out. I really hope we don’t redecorate our conference room because where I sit now, I can look at the clock right behind the boss’s head and he’ll never know…it’s like I’m listening!

2. Have confusing, illegible visuals.

Next, I get super pumped when someone says that they’ve prepared slides to share. I hope there are about 600 of them and that they all have so much tiny text crammed on there that they had to use an unreadable size 9 font. I love fake squinting at the slides to pretend to read them as I ignore the speaker. Even better if there are impossibly confusing flow charts or some kind of animation that I can make fun of later with my coworkers.

3. Don’t - under any circumstances - let other people talk.

This is your meeting - these people are all here for you. Pop them some popcorn and let them just enjoy the show. They are SO lucky to have this chance to hear you speak. If someone forgets their place and tries to insert a “thought,” it is imperative to swiftly remind them that you are in charge by cutting them off abruptly or just rudely talking over them. There may be time at the end for questions, but probably not.

4. Never start or end on time.

Personally, I look forward to sitting down in the conference room five minutes before the meeting is supposed to start so I can meditate alone for a good twenty or thirty minutes. I have kids, so this is some of the only quiet time I have in the day. And, once we do get going, there’s nothing I love more than frantically emailing the group of people I’m supposed to meet with next that the meeting I’m in is running twenty or thirty minutes long. It’s awesome to give the gift of quiet meditation time to others… a wonderful ripple effect.

weekly meetings

5. Whatever happens, never, ever get real work done.

I love meetings where we get right up to the edge of accomplishing something, and then schedule another meeting to actually do that thing. Phew! We were dangerously close to productivity there… I’m so glad we pulled it back.

6. Strive for confusion about the purpose and agenda.

Everyone loves surprises! What’s the fun in knowing what the meeting will be about ahead of time? Communicating the purpose and agenda in advance really lacks creativity and limits the amount of time we can waste together in the room. I know I just love spending at least half of the meeting trying to figure out who called the meeting and for what purpose. It’s really fun when this conversation about the agenda becomes the agenda for the meeting.

And…I’m kidding, of course. These are terrible tips, but I am willing to bet at least some of them resonate. If any of the above sound like your weekly team meetings, there is a better way! Check out our Weekly Meeting Resource Center for more information.