Bad meetings are more than just a mere annoyance. They waste the company’s valuable resources, including each employee’s time, and they often result in bad decisions that take even more resources to realize and rectify.

There is simply no excuse for having bad meetings. You can easily bring your employees together and produce excellent results by creating masterful meetings. Our facilitation training experts have tips for how you can make every meeting masterful.

What Is a Masterful Meeting?

Masterful meetings are results-oriented meetings that are properly prepared for and skillfully executed. Masterful meetings:

  • Start on time.
  • Have a clear purpose.
  • Have the right people present.
  • Offer all of the information participants need.
  • Have a carefully planned and executed agenda.
  • Encourage passionate discussion that results in excellent decisions.
  • Encourage genuine engagement.
  • End with a decisive close that leaves participants with a clear understanding of what was done during the meeting and what steps will be taken next.

Stop Bad Meetings

Corporate facilitators put a stop to bad meetings by refusing to tolerate them. The first step is to stop accepting bad or mediocre meetings as “normal.”

Start by announcing your intentions to end bad meetings to your leadership team. Help every person on your leadership team understand the negative effect that bad meetings have, then get them on board with the need to change to masterful meetings.

Implement a “bill of rights” for meetings. That bill of rights could include things like; everyone has the right to know about meetings in advance, meetings should only include necessary people, all information needed should be prepared ahead of time, and tardiness will not be accepted.

Other concepts you may want to include are ground rules for meetings, such as the opportunity to provide input as a participant, and timely ends to meetings.

Use Facilitation Training Strategies

Switching gears to have masterful meetings instead of bad ones can be a difficult process. Leadership Strategies recommends looking into professional facilitator training sessions to help your employees understand the basic facilitation strategies behind holding masterful meetings.