The room is warm. 8 of us are crammed around a table too small for four. The boss has been rambling on for hours, but he is still on his first PowerPoint slide because that is all he had time to prepare. Susan and Robert are half asleep, Jozsef has got down to some serious work and is sending mails on his phone and David, as usual, has shouted, interrupted and generally bullied his points onto the non-existent agenda. I only have two things to discuss which are burning issues but we are already overtime and nobody will have time or energy to deal with them. At least the projector is blowing out some refreshing warm air.  All of these things could have been solved if someone had just taken responsibility for the meeting.

Situations like this are happening more and more over the past few years. Meetings and their culture are one of the key motivation/demotivation factors in modern organisations. Not to mention their effect on operation. When you take remote meetings where groups of people are standing screaming into a single mobile on loudspeaker while the boss/customer in the US, Germany etc listens helplessly, the situation becomes even more colourful. As a trainer, coach and consultant, my goal is to foster a better meeting and leadership culture. In the next few posts myself or one of my colleagues will share some of our experiences on ways to do that. Until then feel free to post your comments on some of the meeting experiences you have had!