Transform meeting effectiveness

The answer to this question is complicated. It is also largely irrelevant. A more important question is ‘How effective do you want them to be?’, since that is probably as good as you are going to get.

People are much more likely to achieve and sustain their own goals than an arbitrary standard proposed by someone who does not know your situation.

While we cannot answer the question ‘How good do you want to be?’ for you, we can at least map out a picture of the territory most people pass through on their way to meeting effectiveness. We call such a map a maturity model.

This meeting effectiveness maturity model serves three purposes:

The maturity model enables groups of people to discuss and agree, across different aspects of meeting effectiveness: Their start point; their goal; and their immediate focus for moving forward. A simplified version can be found below, or a more comprehensive version can be found here).

Using the meeting effectiveness maturity model

To use the meeting effectiveness maturity model, we would suggest you give copies to your team members/attendees and have them mark individually in each row: Where they think the meetings currently are; and where they see as a practical goal to aim for. Mark this on a large chart, and initiate a discussion to help to share perspectives (particularly in respect to practicality and benefits) and reach a consensus.

The group can then identify the priorities they want to begin working on, and each subsequent meeting can review progress against that.