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Meeting Culture: How to achieve meeting performance excellence
Review your meeting performance and drive change
Pre-work #1: Meeting Inventory
Pre-work #2: Meeting questions
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Clarity of purpose

Can we see at-a-glance why we're spending this time?
Ideally, your team should be able to look at the calendar and understand exactly why they need to spend time in the meetings scheduled there. Unfortunately, instead of a purposeful meeting name, or a culturally unique meeting name developed by your team, many people schedule meetings that don’t tell you anything about what they’re meant to achieve.

To identify meetings that might not be well-defined, look for those that literally contain the word “meeting” in the title (as well as synonyms like “discussion”). Add or edit synonyms in the
Meeting synonoms
⁠
at the bottom of this page.
Potential meetings to rename
Submitter
Meeting Name
New Meeting Name
Al Chen
Management sync
​
James Booth
Weekly sales team meeting
​
Team sync
​
Analytics meeting
​
LT
Lola Tseudonym
Product sync
​
Management sync
​
Mary Jones
Product sync
​
Analytics meeting
​
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Why This Matters

Great meeting names explain exactly why you’re holding that meeting.
Here’s an example: Let’s say you have a meeting on your calendar called “Budget Meeting.” That only tells people that you’re reserving time to talk about money. Rename that meeting to clarify the kind of meeting you expect to run and what you need to accomplish.
Possible new names for a "Budget Meeting"
If the Meeting Type is...
The new meeting name might be...
1
Brainstorming
Identify ways to cut costs
2
Planning
Draft a proposed budget
3
Sensemaking
Review the proposed budget and provide feedback
4
Problem Solving
Figure out what to do about the budget shortfall
5
Decision Making
Decide on a possible budget increase
There are no rows in this table
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Not sure about the purpose for one of your meetings? Stefan Godo suggests this exercise:
At the beginning of the meeting, ask each participant to write what they think the meeting’s purpose is in ONE sentence.
Collect the papers and read them in the last 10 minutes of the meeting. If the team mostly agrees, use the information on the papers to create a new meeting name. If they don’t, bring this up when you
Review Results and Decide on Changes
⁠
.
Meeting synonoms
⁠
Current synonyms:
@meeting
@sync
@discussion
@check-in
@session
@Call
@chat
@get together
@go over
@collaborate
@piggyback
@connect on
@dialogue
@touch base
@follow up
@talk
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👉 Next:
Review Results and Decide on Changes
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