S02E17 The It's Not About Meetings Episode (with Elise Keith)

Check-In Question:

• Share a memorable meeting experience.

Big Ideas:

• Rituals in meetings
• Clear structures in meetings get to a result
• How we feel in a meeting matters
• Power dynamics in meetings
• A common ritual - rotating "leadership" of the meeting
• Rituals can vary depending on the type of organization and their values and the spirit of what you are doing
• Check-ins would be great in every organization, but the questions will change
• Check-ins can set the tone of the entire meeting
• Not all groups need to connect and build trust together
• Airport book advice - not all advice is right for you
• Tailor the ritual to the context
• Levels of maturity in the ways that people gather
• Each leader has to decide how they want to meet
• Meetings both reflect and create our culture
• Stopping all meetings isn't the answer
• The courage to step up and change the meeting culture in an organization
• Creating intentionality in your meetings
• 16 core types of meetings within an organization
• What is the value/opportunity in the meeting?
• Every time we have a conversation with someone, it's a meeting
• Putting people into a room to solve a problem doesn't work
• Having an intention and outline is usually all we need to have a great meeting
• Great practice - Not calling meetings "meetings" - give them a specific name to the purpose
• What impacts meetings are hard to count
• Can other work exist around all the meetings that are recommended?
• Meeting load increases in any crisis
• Asynchronous communication can reduce the needed meeting time
• Meeting Free Fridays - time block rituals
• Meeting time depends on many factors - human attention spans
• True collaboration takes longer
• Time box status reporting - async if possible

Resources:

• Lucid Meetings
• The Four Agreements  by Don Miguel Ruiz
• Where the Action Is: The Meetings that Make or Break Your Organization
• 16 Types of Meetings
• Meeting Guides and Templates
• The Art of Gathering  by Priya Parker
• Getting to Yes by William Ury
• Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss
• New Rules for Work 

Elise Keith Bio:
J. Elise Keith is the founder and CEO of Lucid Meetings, a meeting innovation company dedicated to making it easy for teams to run successful meetings every day. In 2020, Lucid Meetings was recognized as one of the top 10 global influencer brands on the topic of remote work and virtual meetings.

In 2023, Elise and David Mastronardi from the Gamestorming Group joined forces to host the New Rules for Work experiment, a four-part program seeking reliably excellent ways to unleash team creativity in meetings.

Elise is the author of Where the Action Is: The Meetings That Make or Break Your Organization .

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