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Episode 099

February 10, 2021

099: How to grow your meeting culture with Elise Keith

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    Intro

    Bad meetings are all too common, but they are merely the product of every bad meeting that has come before them.

    So, how do we break the cycle of unstructured, imbalanced, aimless meetings and create a structure and process that makes meetings enjoyable and productive?

    There’s nobody better to answer that question than Elise Keith, founder and CEO of Lucid Meetings.

    Elise joined me in this episode to discuss the essentials of understanding meetings, how we can use them as tools to impact our work for the better, and what we need to do to reclaim their power.

    So, join us for a conversation that explores how you can start the important design and preparation work of creating a strong meeting culture within any organisation.

     

    Find out about

    • Why good meetings are the result of structure and mandates, not chance
    • How to get the basics – like structure and meeting minutes – right
    • Comparing Amazon and Brené Brown’s meeting structures
    • How online meetings can act as a great equaliser
    • The most common thing we get wrong about meetings – and how to can avoid it
    • How the shift to online meetings has democratised and simplified facilitation… and thrown up new complications
    • How options for anonymity in online meetings can help us flatten the room

     

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    Feeling inspired by the conversation in this episode? We can have our own – take a seat at my virtual table as part of a Mastermind Group.

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    Questions and Answers

    01:04When did you start calling yourself a facilitator? 04:09Is the structure of a meeting more important than its facilitation? 06:29Is there a silver bullet that makes people respect a meeting’s timing and structure? 08:43Is rotating facilitation in a meeting a good idea? 12:14How do we escape the Catch 22 of having ineffective meetings and the desire to stay up-to-date? 15:01What is the best way to produce meeting minutes? 16:31What is your meeting routine in your own company? 19:49Can a good meeting culture proliferate from one team across an organisation? 21:26What are the hallmarks of good meeting structure? 23:35How important are check-ins? 27:08Can we have good online meetings if we never had good offline ones? 32:21What is the one thing you think we get wrong with meetings? 36:25Is there an exercise you would recommend to a team that’s rethinking their meeting culture? 49:38Could Agile genuinely be applied to something like gardening? 40:31How can we help people see their own blindspots? 43:11Have we learned anything from online meetings that we can apply to offline ones? 49:22What is your strategy to help the quieter voices in a meeting speak up and feel heard? 52:03What is the one thing you would like people to take away from this episode?

    Links

    Elise’s business: Lucid Meetings

    Elise’s book: Where the Action Is: The Meetings That Make or Break Your Organization

    5 things every company should do (article)

    Meeting tools

    Lucid Meetings Events

    Joe Allen: Suddenly Virtual: Making Remote Meetings Work

    Teooh – avatar-based, online conferencing tool

    Connect to Elise

    LinkedIn