The Surprising Science of Meetings: How You Can Lead Your Team to Peak Performance

promoting consensus, thus serving as a focal point for collective drive and energy.

By engaging in this practice of rating meetings and making improvements based on feedback, Weight Watchers is creating a culture that elevates the importance of meetings.

Another opportunity for leader development and accountability is to conduct 360-degree feedback surveys that contain some content on meetings.

Namely, performance is optimal when some level of stress exists, and performance is lowest in the absence of stress, as well as when there is an abundance of stress.

Beliefs around the value and benefits of employee inclusion, of empowerment, of teams, of employee buy-in, and of employee engagement are more prominent than ever as efficient ways to achieve short-term and long-term organizational survival and success. Meetings are a key mechanism to express these values.

When you take into account all the direct costs and potential indirect costs, the investment in meetings is incredibly significant. If you liken a meeting to a type of communication technology, could this actually be one of the largest unidentified line items in an organizational budget?

They think carefully about the design and execution of the meeting, from soup to nuts—they never just “phone it in.

Although these facilitation techniques are consistent with servant leadership and can certainly promote meeting success, none of this precludes a leader from being direct and assertive and moving the discussion forward actively if needed. In fact, jumping into the meeting fray and taking control might be exactly what is needed from the meeting lead

there is no other single investment of this magnitude that an organization makes that is treated in such a cavalier manner; where so few resources are allocated to assessing, evaluating, and working to improve meetings, both locally and enterprise-wide.