How much do you enjoy going to meetings? In my view meetings can be the second biggest time-waster after email. I’m sure you’ve been in a meeting where it seemed there was no clear point, no end in sight or where no decisions were made. Maybe you’ve got a meeting like that today. Anyway, despite our regular participation in meetings day after day, it amazes me how poorly organized and managed they can often be.

We put up with much and seem to apply little of what we have learned when it comes to our turn to lead a meeting. So here I am sharing a few of my golden rules for meetings in the hope that they inspire some more productive meetings down the track…

1.    Compelling Reason – the first and most important thing is to make sure that you really need to have a meeting at all. There are only a handful of good reasons to have a meeting – to give or receive information, to build engagement, to develop options or to make decisions.