60 minutes go by, everybody walks out of the room or clicks off Zoom. “That meeting should have been an email.”
We want to avoid this at all costs. How do you conduct really effective meetings? I’m going to give you two tools in this video. The first tool you can think of as a DELETE button on how to actually delete meetings off your calendar. And the second tool you can think of as an EDIT button for the meetings you do have.
When I work with leaders and some of the smartest leaders and educators on the planet, what I find is that most of them spend 20 plus hours a week in meetings, and there’s a collective groan when people talk about that. So, I’m going to give you a really good cultural delete button to reduce that number, to actually reduce the number of meetings on your calendar.
And then the second tool is the edit button for your meeting. So, if you would like them to actually be really purposeful and meaningful, I’m going to give you one framing that you can share with a group, and it will reframe the way that you meet from this video onward.
Tool #1: JOMO – The Joy of Missing Out
Here’s your delete button: JOMO, the joy of missing out. This only works if everybody on the team has the phrase JOMO. So, everybody in the world, or most people in the world, have FOMO, the fear of missing out. JOMO is the joy of missing out.
The idea is to build a culture where you can give people, as the leader or as an individual contributor in an organization, the joy of missing out on a meeting and getting an hour to actually move things forward or produce work in some way by designating a clear purpose for the meeting and being really clear who absolutely should be in this meeting to accomplish that purpose. And if there’s anybody that’s like, “Ah, it’d be good for them to know,” again, if your whole team has watched this video and has JOMO in their head, it’s not about uninviting people. It’s not excluding people from a meeting. It’s the culture of like, “Oh, how can we all look to save each other time?”
It’s for me to extract myself from a meeting as one possibility. But then, for me to invite somebody else to leave a meeting, not by saying, “Hey, we don’t want you to be in the room. We’re gonna talk about sensitive stuff.” No, it’s saying, “You’ve got an hour for free. I think we can tackle this just the four of us, and then we’ll bring you in, in two weeks when we’re ready for graphic design,” or whatever it is. The graphic designers don’t need to be there for seven meetings; they could just be there for the fifth meeting when you actually know what you want to be designed, for example.
Tool #2: The Edit Button – Transforming Meetings
Now, the most fantastic, awesome reframe of this is I was leading a virtual meeting in Australia, and I got finished leading the session. It was around 11 p.m. Eastern time. I walked out of my office on the sixth floor of this building, and the custodian walked in. I think I scared the heck out of him because people don’t work at 11 p.m., and I usually don’t either. But I walked out, and we bumped into each other. We’ll call him Steve for anonymity’s sake.
Steve and I just got into a little chat. He’s an eccentric character, and I asked him how things have been going. He said, “Oh, good. I just had a meeting with my boss and my boss’s boss.” I was like, “Tell me more.” He said, “I’m in this meeting, and they cut my workload in half. I have to clean half the floors I used to, and they gave me a raise.” What he said to me verbatim was, “I walked out of that meeting, and I was like, man, I gotta have more meetings.”
Pairing this up with my experience of working with clients in big organizations where they’re “over-meetinged.” They don’t have a culture of JOMO, or joy of missing out, and so they’re in too many meetings that they shouldn’t be in. But what Steve planted in my brain was, do you realize that it is possible to have meetings that people walk out of saying, “Wow, that was a really phenomenal meeting?” It is possible to have a meeting like that.
Now, a really easy way is to cut people’s workload in half and give them a raise. But the more realistic version is this: I’ve gotten clear recently that all of our future is shaped and edited by our speaking—and our listening. There are a couple of material reality things that I can’t quite explain with that logic, like hurricanes or tsunamis. But, in a working context, in a meeting, we’re in an organization trying to get something done. All of our future is created in our speaking and our listening.
Intentions that Edit the Future
And yet somehow in corporate culture, we’ve just developed this, “Ah, another meeting” culture about it. What if we walked in with the mindset that, not only it could be, but we were determined to make this meeting a talk that actually edited tomorrow? So, we come in with the intention that we are going to talk our way into a _________ tomorrow.
Here’s the framing. Here’s your sentence stem to hang on to: If every meeting had the embedded intention, “We are here right now from 9:00 to 10:00 AM to talk our way into a _________ tomorrow.” Do you want it more clear tomorrow? Do you want it simpler? Do you want it less work? Set an intention about what kind of a future you want to create in that meeting. So many meetings happen, and they don’t actually have a clear intent or purpose. In 60 seconds, you can say, “Our intention in the next hour is [blank].” You might even add the words “so that” at the end of it and fill in the deeper purpose or ideal behind that meeting.
If you like the idea of JOMO and you like the idea of talking your way into tomorrow and being really clear about intention and setting a culture where all meetings have a clear intention, there is one way you can ensure that that happens. It is to go down and copy this link and share it with the people that you meet with. And say in a message, “For the good of all humanity, can we adopt the culture of JOMO and perhaps raising the stakes of our meetings and seeing them as an edit button to have what happens next?”
I’m Chad Littlefield. There are 500 other videos like this with really useful stuff. Consider subscribing. Have an awesome day!