I truly believe if we could change the quality of our meetings, not only would people's happiness and productivity go through the roof, we would need less meetings. Imagine a bright future ahead of us: no more meetings for the sake of meetings!

Much of the training I have been involved in delivering has prepared people to run good events. We have covered off the worldview of why we need greater engagement, provided people with models to support planning but then taught methods that only really work for larger groups. Most of the people I am working with these days are running day to day meetings, 30 - 90 minutes long with 4-8 people in them. We all know the pain of badly run meetings—Monty Python gets it spot on.

The training needs to get more granular and focused on the day to day skillful leading of effective and meaningful meetings. Meetings that matter! If we can change things on this day to day level we begin to build a more engaged culture within our organisations, communities and systems. The more engaged people are, the greater ownership they feel and the more motivated they are to generate results. All too often we try to bully or incentive people into action rather than shifting how we organize ourselves around our work.

This has been the inspiration for Leading Effective Meetings, the new online course Tuesday Ryan Hart and I are offering. We ran a pilot last fall, got positive feedback and are now launching the training as part of Word Done Better, Together. Greater participation needs to become business as usual—rather than be a series of exciting events that give a break from the normal way of doing things. If we want to be able to respond and adapt to the constantly changing circumstances around us—we have to be able to meet, engage multiple perspectives, figure out a critical path forward and continue to learn as we go. Bluntly put—if we can't figure out how to meet properly we stand a very low chance of running a successful organisation or initiative.

Check out the Work Done Better. Together site, spread the word on the leading effective meetings program if you like it but more importantly let's all figure out how we train in the day to day of running good meetings. That way we can influence the way everything happens, rather than just a few strategic initiatives.

This post was originally published at Tim Merry's site.

Leading meetings that matter, every day