The Secret to a Good Meeting Is the Meeting Before the Meeting

John Maxwell

• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781400275519
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Smart leaders learn from their own mistakes. Smarter ones learn from others' mistakes—and successes.  John C. Maxwell wants to help you become the smartest leader you can be by sharing Chapter 18,The Secret To A Good Meeting Is the Meeting Before The Meeting, of Leadership Gold with you. After nearly forty years of leading, Maxwell has mined the gold so you don't have to. Each chapter contains detailed application exercises and a "Mentoring Moment" for leaders who desire to mentor others using the book. Gaining leadership insight is a lot like mining for gold. You don't set out to look for the dirt. You look for the nuggets. You'll find them here.

THE SECRET TO A GOOD
MEETING IS THE MEETING
BEFORE THE MEETING

How do you feel about meetings? If you’re like most leaders, they’re not your favorite thing. I know that’s true for me. I value action, progress, and results—just as most leaders do. But how often are the meetings you are asked to attend characterized by those qualities? Most meetings are about as productive as a panda mating at a zoo. The expectations for them are very high, but the results usually turn out to be terribly disappointing. As economist John Kenneth Galbraith observed, “Meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything.”

I enjoy the story about a conference room where management put the following slogans up on the walls to try to inspire the people who would be meeting there:

Intelligence is no substitute for information.

Enthusiasm is no substitute for capacity.

Willingness is no substitute for experience.

They hastily removed the slogans after someone added their own:

A meeting is no substitute for progress.

Anyone who has spent a lot of time in meetings knows that a meeting may take minutes, but it usually wastes hours. And anytime the outcome of a meeting is to have another meeting, you know you’re in trouble.

Some of the meetings that we organize and lead ourselves aren’t any better. Have you ever planned a meeting only to be bushwhacked in it by the people you asked to attend? That occurred to me early in my career. In the first board meeting I held as a young leader, I went in with a plan and an agenda, and it took ninety-three seconds for the real leader to assume control over the meeting and take us wherever he wanted to go. The first few years I was in leadership, I felt like Gomer Pyle. Do you remember him from The Andy Griffith Show and later Gomer Pyle, USMC? Poor Gomer never had a clue. He never knew what was coming next, and when confronted with the unexpected, he’d do one of two things. Either his eyes would bug out and he’d exclaim, “Well, gaaaaaaw-ley,” or he’d grin from ear to ear and crow, “Sur-prise, sur-prise, sur-prise!” I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be a Gomer Pyle–type of leader!

Some people react to the difficulties they have with meetings by try...