The meeting world is full of villains — you know who they are, the meetings they attend, and the time they waste. Here's your guide to fighting back.
You've dealt with one or more of these before. Maybe you called them different names, but we've all seen them turn a good meeting bad. So we put names to faces — and matched each one to the fix that shuts it down.
Won't give up the floor.
Always talking. Whether they actually have a point — or whether it's even the right time — means nothing. If they've got something to say, by George, it's getting said.
Set per-topic time limits up front, so everyone (the hog included) knows exactly what's on the table and how long they've got.
Meets about meetings.
Schedules a meeting just to talk about the next meeting. Every status update and tiny decision becomes another block on your calendar.
Meetings are for discussion, not status updates. Meeting scores and cost analytics expose the ones that should've been an email, a call, or a DM.
Keeps the whole room waiting.
Every meeting is ready to begin and you're waiting on that one person. By the time they finally show up, the flow is completely lost.
Start on time, every time. Timed agendas mean latecomers miss the info — and quickly learn not to fall behind again.
Steers onto their own topic.
You booked the meeting to cover one thing. They show up, veer straight onto something completely different, and burn the whole slot.
A parking lot catches off-topic tangents and saves them for later, so the agenda you set is the agenda you actually run.
Books meetings with no plan.
Ever sat in a meeting and not been sure what it was even about? Everyone waits quietly to see where it goes. It runs long, wanders, and ends with nothing decided.
Every invite carries an agenda template, so the purpose — and everyone's prep — is set before anyone walks in.
The trick to handling any of them isn't treating it as a personnel problem you can't fix — it's adding the right meeting structure to overcome their disruptive powers.
Bonus tactic: the parking-lot mascot. One team we worked with kept an Elmo doll on the table. Whenever the discussion drifted off-agenda, a manager would hold it up and say "Ok, I've got Elmo" — and everyone knew to shelve the tangent and get back on topic. It gave the whole team a shared, slightly tongue-in-cheek vocabulary for enforcing good meeting habits. Would your meetings be more effective with a mascot everyone felt empowered to use?
Want another one for your rogues' gallery? Meet The Meeting Parrot — the one who repeats everything everyone else already said.
Timed agendas, a parking lot for tangents, and scores that call out the meetings that shouldn't exist — Less Meeting gives you the structure to shut every one of them down, on the calendar you already use.