“Shopify axe meetings with more than two people.”

Should you?

Actually the headline is misleading. They axed recurring meetings for 2 weeks and then put back ...

When we work on leadership, we expect to go deep, reflect, explore ourselves and others.

I’m not sure people have the same expectation about meetings. They wan...

Meetings have a habit of resisting improvement. They ping back like an elastic band.

But there are moments in time when people are open to change.

And one of ...

If you’re going to lead better meetings, I need to shake the foundations under your feet.

Here goes.

Though there are MANY expressions of how organisations ar...

Leaders confuse informality with distributed power. Not the same.

“Ohhhh, we all say what we think in this team”

“There’s no hierarchy round here - it’s very ...

10 years ago, I was too 'scared' to ask people how a meeting I was leading went.

Let's not open that can of worms.

We all did our best. We're all so, so busy....

A lot of innovation in meetings focuses on innovation meetings.

Most of the meetings people actually spend their working life in are much more mundane.

For su...

10 years ago I was absolutely swamped with meetings.

I didn’t really have a clue how to make any of them properly support what me and my team were trying to do...

Here are 8 great questions I ask all the time.

The end of a meeting is juicy opportunity to capture and transfer value.

And to create a clear, committed, trus...

Old way:                                                                                          

👉 Start and finish on time

👉 Follow an agenda

👉 Be a nice ...

My research shows that people want ‘a fair swap’ when they go to a meeting.

Crucially relative to the time they give up and the cognitive effort they put in th...

Meeting patterns have worn a DEEP groove into our corporate psyche.

If you’ve tried to improve your meeting culture and not managed to make a big dent, I'm not...

Leaders, how’s your coaching?

There is no more powerful place to develop your coaching leadership style* than in a meeting.

What you say and do in a group is ...

Stop winging it. Start scaffolding.

With zero structure, meetings become circular, inefficient or dominated by a handful of people.

With too much structure, c...

I see you in back-to-back meetings all day.

I see you hello!-ing and how-are-you?-ing on the hour, every hour.

I see you starting the meeting. But not really ...

Start the week by getting out of your team's way.

If you’re invited to the same meeting as someone who reports to you, ask yourself:

Why am I going?

Unless y...

I don’t really like conflict.

It makes me feel a bit sick, especially in meetings where any disagreement is played out in full view of everyone.

But good conf...

If one thing in one meeting is annoying you…

~ Wait, ONE thing? ~

One thing for now.

The simplest, lowest friction way to change is just to reflect on it out...

When trust is shaky, there is a simple, high integrity way to develop it.

Most people don’t do it.

Here it is, with four examples.

When you meet with people ...

Few of us enjoy having a tense stand off in a meeting. It's exhausting. It slows work down. It makes teams perform poorly.

But here's the thing.

Conflict come...

May I introduce you to scaffolding? Supportive rules that underpin faster, bolder meetings...

Part of reason some meetings are frustrating, circular or just we...

(This article is from my Thursday FrictionFree email - get it in your inbox every week)

Tribes are how human society formed to survive safely in a dangerous wo...