Meetings can be one of the biggest time-wasters we can be involved with. They can be directionless, unfocused, long, and worst of all: pointless. There have been countless strategies put out there to combat the tedium of meetings, such as having “chairless” meetings, limiting meetings to 15 minutes, conducting…

This has been a tough year for a lot of businesses. The economy has yet to rebound (it may never fully) and with a downtrodden economic situation often comes a despressed workforce. I’m not talking about the overall unemployment problem; I’m talking about the problem that those who have jobs are dealing with: elevated…

Monday is Labor Day, a holiday created for workers to get a much needed day off. Of course in practice it doesn’t work out. On the holiday itself bosses will text or call employees with something they “need to review and give a POV on” prior to a Tuesday meeting “because it will be so…

You’ve got your list of things you want to accomplish for today, and yet, after a series of meetings that you had to go to throughout the day, none of the things on your list got done. That’s because meetings are almost always a huge drain on your time, and should be killed on sight. Think about…

…or girl. Scott Ginsberg’s story is that one day after an event at college, he decided to keep his name tag on. What he noticed was he was instantly more approachable the rest of the day. Since then Scott has kept the name tag on [for an odd 2400 days], writing a few books on meeting people…

Ian McKenzie has a few tips to keep those office visits as short as you like, so you can get back to work. There’s nothing worse than someone over-staying there welcome, at work or otherwise. Be the visitor. If you have to speak with someone, go to their office. That way, you can control the length…

One of life’s greatest annoyances for me is the time spent waiting for a meeting to begin. The Berkun blog gives some great advice about how to get meetings off on a good foot by starting on time. What tips can you share with the group about how you get your…

Alexander Kjerulf recently wrote an article entitled, “Five weeeeeeeeird tips for great meetings.” The tips are somewhat unconventional, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call them weird. The tips are focused around trying to make meetings not brutally boring. The following are the condensed version of the five tips…

At Say Leadership Coaching (SLC) we concentrate our efforts on just that which our name implies; coaching the leadership in companies to reach their greater potential. Executives are but one group we work with; there are leaders at every level of a company’s official org chart, and we find that titles can be irrelevant…

I’ve been thinking and writing quite a lot this week about Hamburger Management: the type of management approach that is based on always doing whatever is quickest, simplest and (above all) cheapest. Hamburger Managers provide the kind of leadership that is best described as: “Never mind the quality, look how fast it goes and how…

The difference between Starbucks and McDonalds from a coffee perspective is what? The experience. Starbucks wants almost $4 for a cup of coffee near me, and McDonalds wants $2. Starbucks wants $6 an hour for wifi, and McDonalds wants $2. It’s far more cost effective for a road warrior to sit in a McDonalds doing…

In multi-team meetings, there are frequently situations where people within the same team contradict one another. I might view the project as being accomplished in one way; my colleague might come right behind me and say it can’t be done that way. If there’s any sense of time available to get things done, take that…

Meetings can have lots of loose flow to them. They start a little late because people show up a little late. There’s that spot where you haven’t seen Jumpha in a while and you ask about her children. You pass out the agenda and people face-down a while browsing it and shuffling papers. Some folks…