Meeting Culture: How to achieve meeting performance excellence

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Review your meeting performance and drive change

The way teams meet has a huge impact on their success. Are your meetings working for your team? Use this doc to review your current meeting culture and begin the conversation with your team.

Elise Keith

Some teams run consistently effective meetings every day. No joke.

Most teams run meetings out of habit. These meeting habits emerge gradually over time, changing whenever a new leader joins the team, or when the company reorganizes, or when someone brings in a cool new meeting technique they picked up somewhere. New meetings pop up like weeds, and while the team occasionally whacks them down, pretty soon the calendar fills up again.

The best teams design their meeting habits intentionally. They establish explicit agreements and practices to ensure their meetings are effective and strategically aligned to their business goals. Their meeting time is planned, maintained, and sculpted to optimize their performance.

Whether this is your team’s first attempt to improve your meetings, or you’ve tried to make changes in the past that didn’t stick, or even if you have well-designed meetings that you haven’t reviewed in the past 6 months, you can use this doc to review your team’s meeting culture and decide on strategies to increase your performance.

What It Does

With this doc, you and your team can:

See how much time (and $$$!) you’re investing in meetings.

Learn how your meetings impact your work in both good and bad ways.

Spot patterns that impact your overall work performance.

Gather insights about what is and is not working in your meeting culture today.

Facilitate a frank discussion about your meeting culture with your team.

Identify actionable ways to make meaningful improvements.

Create alignment and commitment to running more successful meetings every day.

Who Will Benefit

This tool is for teams with leaders who:

Have the required authority and interest in making changes to their meetings.

Invite candor in their team discussions.

Lead by example.

This doc is designed to help you and your team shine a bright light on your current meeting habits, then hold a candid conversation about how you might change your meetings for the better. It works best for teams willing to talk openly about their meeting performance in search of better ways of working.

Why? The discussion about meeting performance can raise a host of surprisingly sensitive topics. Your team’s meeting culture is one of the most concentrated examples of your overall culture. Who speaks, how decisions get made, what you talk about and what you don’t; you can see all of this in your meetings.

If someone offered me a single piece of evidence to assess the health of an organization, I would want to observe the executive team during a meeting.

- Patrick Lencioni, author and organizational health expert

That makes this a really cool, powerful discussion. How might your work be more fulfilling, more joyful, and less stressful if your team took control of your meetings? Use this doc and find out.

Ready to get started? Here’s the four step process.

Step 1: Complete the Prework

This pre-work sets the stage for an informed, inclusive, and frank conversation about your meeting culture.

Share this doc with your team. Ask everyone to complete the two Pre-work steps:

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Pre-work #1: Meeting Inventory Everyone completes an inventory of their meetings separately. This creates actual data to inform your discussion, which works much better than discussing general impressions.⁠

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Pre-work #2: Meeting questions Review your inventory from "Pre-work #1", then answer these high-level questions.⁠

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Step 2: Review the Results

Answers to the pre-work will automatically populate these reports. Each report includes science-backed information that helps you interpret your team’s results.

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Total meeting time by person How much are we really spending in meetings?⁠

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Meetings by employee level How does someone's level in the organization impact meeting time?⁠

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Ad-hoc meetings How much unplanned, ad-hoc meeting time was added to our schedule?⁠

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Effectiveness and Importance What was the average effectiveness and importance score for everyone's meetings?⁠

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Clarity of purpose Can we see at-a-glance why we're spending this time?⁠

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Step 3: Decide What to Change

Schedule a conversation to discuss what you learned from this exercise and decide on near-term changes you can make to improve your meeting culture.

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Review Results and Decide on Changes Use this retrospective-inspired template to discuss your results, capture notes, and add action items documenting the changes your team will make to improve your meeting performance.⁠

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Step 4: Do it!

Implement your ideas and transform your meeting culture for the better!

Watch a video walkthrough of the doc below:

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👉 Start with:

Pre-work #1: Meeting Inventory⁠

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This doc is based on research into exactly what it takes for companies to run successful meetings every day, which we’ve documented in the

Meeting Performance Maturity Model⁠

. You can read more about this process and the research behind it

on our blog⁠

Want help? Lucid Meetings offers workshops, on-demand training, and a comprehensive

Meeting Culture Transformation Program⁠

Contact Lucid Meetings

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Thank you to everyone who provided feedback on this template:

Nancy Settle-Murphy⁠

Chris Dyer⁠

Norman Wolfe⁠

Dr. Joseph Allen⁠

Dave Foster⁠

Mark Kilby⁠

Stefan Godo⁠

Robert Hopkin⁠

Martin Duffy⁠

Diana Larsen⁠

Kelvin McGrath⁠

Dr. Alison Woods Brooks⁠

Willem Standaert⁠

, and more.

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