victoria park march 2018 BCBusiness 25
KEEP IT SHORT
Book half the time you think you
need. "If I'm going to book a one-hour
meeting, I'll end up booking it for 30
minutes," Herold notes. "If I'm think-
ing about booking a one-day meet-
ing, I'll book it for four hours." Think
about the agenda beforehand: what
items you want to cover and how
many minutes each will actually take.
"That usually allows you to realize
that you can book the meeting
in a much shorter amount of time
than you would have started with,"
Herold advises.
GIvE EvERYOnE A cHAncE TO SPEAK
Herold likes to give everyone a stack of
Post-Its at the start of the meeting and
ask them to write down one idea per
note. Have the most junior or newest
employee read out their ideas €rst, and
leave the most senior, longest-standing or
even whoever booked the meeting until
the end. Herold points out that this gives
more junior or quieter people a voice and
takes far less time than letting a dominant
staƒer talk nonstop. "Often the most
senior person doesn't need to give their
ideas at all because by the time it gets to
them, they've already heard some great
ones from the team," he adds.
DOn'T OvERInvITE
Think critically about who you want to
ask to a meeting, and consider what else
they could be working on instead. "Don't
just invite them for the sake of inviting
them," Herold explains. If your employ-
ees think they can better spend their
time helping core areas of the business,
let them skip the meeting.
START On TIME
The only way to begin on schedule
is to €nish every meeting and phone
call €ve minutes before the scheduled
ending time. "That gives you time to
walk down the hall, talk to your assis-
tant, grab coƒee, go to the bathroom
and still show up on time for the next
meeting," Herold explains. It creates
a built-in buƒer between one call or
meeting and the next one. ‡
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"nO AGEnDA, nO ATTEnDA"
Let employees wait until they've
seen the agenda before con€rm-
ing whether they will attend.
"That forces everyone to put an
agenda in place to say, 'Here's
what we're covering, here's the
order we're covering it, here's
how many minutes we're spend-
ing on each item,' and that allows
people to opt out or opt into the
meeting," Herold observes. "Oth-
erwise, why am I showing up in
the €rst place?"
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cameron herold wrote Meetings Suck: Turning One of the Most Loathed
Elements of Business Into One of the Most Valuable because most people
have had no training at running them. the former
coo of vancouver-based
1-800-got-Junk? now heads his
coo alliance mastermind group, splitting
his time between vancouver and scottsdale, arizona. "i've been coaching
ceos all over the world, and it was a common thing that i kept noticing, so i
decided to codify how to actually run meetings," he says
by Felicity Stone
Help for Huddlers
DIy mANAgEmENT
