Hey, it's Rachel Cook, your modern mentor. I'm the founder of Lead Above Noise, a firm

specializing in helping teams and organizations create better working experiences that deliver better

results. And apparently these days, one of the biggest pain points in people's working experience,

it's that feeling of drowning under meetings. Oh man, poor

meetings. How have they come to be so evil? I'm seeing all over LinkedIn headlines about

companies just shutting them down. All done. No more meetings. The insinuation, of course,

being, look at us. Look how much we value productivity and impact.

And meetings are clearly the opposite of both. These posts garner a lot of attention, lots of likes and hearts.

And I get it. Shutting down meetings is a splashy move. Attention is warranted.

But also, is the problem that we're having meetings or is the problem

that we're having unproductive meetings? For me, it's more the latter. Meetings that are

well-designed and well-run, they should serve a purpose. And the issue is that we've gotten a little

bit lazy. We aren't being discerning in the what, the when, the why, the how, and the who.

We're just putting them on the calendars, massive invite lists and all.

And people are drained and exhausted and wondering when to get the actual work done.

But here's the thing.

A good meeting is one that actually furthers the work. It moves the right

group of people to make a critical decision or define their means of collaborating or solve a

problem or generate possibilities. That whole this meeting should have been an email thing

is real. If the purpose of your meeting is to disseminate information or provide an update or share details, then, yeah, it probably should have been an email.

So let's talk about when to call a meeting, how to run it well, and whom to invite, to make fees worth the investment of your time, and to avoid crushing yet another soul into dust.

Okay, let's start with when to call a meeting.

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