 Do you hate going to meetings? I think pretty much we all do, but I've got a few tips today to help you make your meetings go better. Welcome back and congratulations on taking one more step towards becoming one of the great leaders of tomorrow. Let's be honest, most of us dread going to meetings because we feel like they're going to be a waste of our time. Today I've got four tips for you that'll make your meetings stand out above everyone else's and stay tuned to the end because I'm going to give you a link to download our workbook to develop your own personal leadership development plan. So when I was a young lieutenant in the Air Force about a year into my career I was talking to one of the other young lieutenants where I was working and he said all my meetings I keep to an hour or less because I feel like meetings become unproductive after about an hour and I had to agree with them and that's kind of a guideline I've used throughout my career. Now it's not always possible to keep a meeting to under an hour sometimes there's just too much you've got to get done but here are four tips no matter how long your meeting is going to be that you can have a successful meeting that people won't feel like you're wasting their time. Tip number one for effective meetings have a clear purpose and make sure everyone coming to the meeting knows that purpose. A lot of times meetings drag on and on because people will bring up things that aren't related to the purpose of the meeting but because they've got all the right people in the same room as the meeting organizer it's your job to make sure that you stick to purpose. Also when you're creating your purpose for the meeting think about what you're really doing here. Meetings really should be for making decisions or bringing work product together that people can't do on their own. Too many times we bring together a meeting and we're trying to do the work at the meeting and there are times when you need to do that and that's okay but make sure that that's the purpose of your meeting and that it's more of a working group kind of scenario and everyone understands it's not a decision meeting. Tip number two is to have an agenda for your meeting and this is a little bit more work up front for you as the meeting organizer but it really pays off in the end. Every decision you're going to make should be on that agenda. Every item you need to cover whether that's information or presentation that needs to be part of that decision making process needs to be on that agenda and just like setting a time limit for the overall meeting we talked about earlier make sure you set a time limit for each item on the agenda. Now there are times that the decision is going to be critical and you need to go over that time limit but as the meeting organizer it's our job to make sure we keep everything on time and moving so we can get people out and on to their next thing. Tip number three is to manage the guest list to your meeting and then you mainly want to do this because you want to get the right people in the room who are going to help you make the decisions that you need to make so whether that's someone who has a presentation to make information to share or someone who has a stake in the decision that's going to be made it's going to impact them in some way you want to get all those people in the room to hear their positions get the information and all make the decision together just as important and maybe even more so is to keep the wrong people out of the room and this happens in big organizations people hear meetings going on they show up they're interested in what's going on but they might not really have a stake in the decision or be up to speed enough on the issue to really contribute but sometimes that does take time getting that up to speed and hearing their thoughts on the issue so remember as a meeting organizer it's our job to get everyone in the room who's going to be impacted by the decision get all the stakeholders in the room get the right people in but make sure we keep the wrong people out. Tip number four for effective meetings that I cannot emphasize this one enough because it happens all the time do not engage in speculation or encourage speculation of facts and information that you need to make your decision if you really need a piece of information to go forward making the decision as the group go get it whether it's in real time or it makes sense to adjourn the meeting and assign someone to go get the right information and bring it back to the group at a later date to make the decision speculation just sends things in circles and people trying to prove each other wrong don't engage in speculation get the facts and information you need to make your decision put it in front of the group make the decision together so these four tips have been kind of geared towards if you're the meeting organizer and a lot of times meetings are frustrating because we are not the meeting organizer we don't have control of what's going on bonus tip for you today if you're not the meeting organizer and you see things going up the rails try to help the meeting organizer apply some of these tips if you found this helpful please share it with a friend or co-worker follow us on social media and we would love it if you would subscribe to our youtube channel and check out our website evilgeniusleadership.com click on that link below in the comments that'll let you download our free leadership development plan workbook and that'll help you set your goals and make a plan to achieve them over the next two five and ten years thanks for watching today i really appreciate it and remember the future is out there lead the way