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by Minor49er 1890 days ago
>How do you handle meeting feedback for meetings by others to make sure it is not just a random meeting with talking, no agenda, no clear outcomes and mainly information sharing?

Easy. (Or at least easier said than done.) Only initiate/attend a meeting if one or more of these things are clearly defined before the meeting even takes place. It can be helpful to approach it like you would a ticket or a to-do at work: identify what the completion criteria is and timebox it, then assign it out or invite people to it who are needed for its success.

Another thing to keep in mind is the hierarchy of your organization. This can reduce the chances of inviting too many or the wrong people. For instance, if a product manager wants to meet about a small upcoming project, they probably don't have to invite the entire development team. Rather, they should invite the lead and have the lead forward the invitation to whoever might be working on it within the dev team.

1 comments

All these points are very true. But let's say you are in a large international organization, competing audiences etc. How you handle political concerns when someone schedule an unnecessary meeting? Can you just tell them straight-ahead? I often find that for many people it is easier to initiate a meeting than rather to share information in written form (that would their work to prepare, while for a meeting everybody else has to spend time).
Sorry for the delay in response. What do you mean in particual by political concerns?

If I'm understanding the situation correctly, if the company is large and spread far apart, an employee should be able to reach out to the leads of other teams, explain what it is that they hope to accomplish with the meeting, and ask the leads to invite anyone else who may either contribute to it or get something out of it. That said, even just pinging those people ahead of time with the question of "do we need to have a meeting about this? / Would this meeting be useful?" can go a long way in either refining the agenda or cancelling the meeting altogether. Depending on the organization, of course.