The Mode/Switch with Craig Mattson
The Mode/Switch Podcast
All in Favor of Making Meetings Better?
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All in Favor of Making Meetings Better?

Please respond by pressing "play" on this podcast. Our intergenerational roundtable discusses ideas for streamlining & improving your weekly meeting.

Here are a few items we don’t need to vote on in our next Teams call:

  • Are we bored in meetings where only two people talk?

  • Are we dying inside when the day is 80% full of one-on-ones?

  • Do we wish our coworkers would stop their damn emailing during meetings?

  • Do we wish we could end a remote meeting by sweeping the laptop straight off the table and into the trashbin?

These motions have already been made, seconded, and approved. There’s consensus on how much we hate poorly run meetings. And yet we can’t solve these problems by eliminating them! Meetings are essential for….

… making sense and

… making decisions and

… making headway.

No organization can thrive without meetings. So why are they so often Not Good? Why are meetings sad, inept, and irksome?

Let’s solve these problems with meetings by holding—another meeting! Well, it’s an intergnerational conversation at the Mode/Switch roundtable. If you join, you’ll learn from author and organizational designer, Jurriaan Kamer whose recent book Unblock: Clear the Way for Results and Develop a Thriving Organization offers great sanity on all things organizational. This week, he’ll help us get unstuck in the weekly meeting.

The philosopher Martin Buber once said, “All real living is meetings.” For me, that suggests a corollary: working life can be really living if it occasions life-giving encounters. Meetings should let more life into our organizations, not less.

I’m excited for you to hear Jurriaan’s advice on one-on-ones (fewer of those, please) and weekly meetings (no more traffic-cop facilitators) and dealing with digital distraction (more bluntness needed). His advice is life-giving in deeply practical ways.

This week’s Mode/Switchers—David Wilstermann, Betty Gronsman, Jake Aupperlee, and I—ask scads of questions of Jurriaan from our different generational experiences. Even better, we share questions from you listeners as well. And we discuss scenarios you’ll recognize from meetings whose memory you’ve tried to repress.

Biggest takeaway from the Mode/Switch Pod this week? Sometimes you have to put the fish on the table. It’s an indispensable Dutch idiom. And if you want to use it in your next meeting, you’ll need to press play on this pod.

-craig


More ways your org can thrive

Want to learn more about Jurriaan’s work and hire his team to unblock your company? Check out his website. He’s also very active on LinkedIn.

Got work-culture questions for our expert guests on the Mode/Switch Pod? Hit reply and share what’s been confusing or irritating or just plain hilarious on the job.

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