Welcome to Manager Tools. Today's topic, How to Handle Meeting Killers, Chapter 6, The Multitasker. Here we go. Today we're going to share with you our guidance on how to address behaviors and

meetings that reduce meeting effectiveness.

This particular show is based on a popular 2012 Wall Street Journal article, and

this chapter deals with handling a multitasker and also reviews some of the Journal's

general meeting guidance.

Now Mark, the Wall Street Journal article was headlined, entitled Meet the Meeting Killers and talked

about a whole bunch of different behaviors in meetings that can ruin meetings.

And for those of you don't know, it was the 15 May 2012 edition and was available to non-subscribers

at the Wall Street Journal website, at least for time.

So you may want to check it out if you haven't already.

Now, we've recur to this paper a few times, and we've talked about the Jokester, the dominator, the naysayer, the silent plotter, the

rambler, and today we're going to talk about what might be the most frequent type of meeting killer you'll see in meetings, the

multitasker.

Yeah, and I'll tell you, something you and I was talking about before we started the cast,

one of the underlying problems with the article that I haven't talked about before,

this is our last cast, so I want to talk about it now, and I mentioned this as a friend of mine the other day and he didn't

get it, and that is that the problem with the article is it implies that the people in

meetings that are the problem with meetings and that could be true but if we

want to be professional managers the only way we can say that's true is if we do everything we can to run an effective meeting.

And frankly, if you go to a meeting and the meeting is terrible, it's probably not mostly the attendees' fault, It's mostly the managers or the meeting leaders, the facilitators fault.

Yeah, so I have to say that this is a classic case where they've actually come up with some good recommendations and of course their manager recommendations.

But they imply that the problem with meetings are the people of the meetings and the solution of course, as always always comes from a management perspective.

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