Book Club: The HBR Guide to Making Every Meeting Matter

One of my biggest pet peeves is having to sit through a meeting that goes on forever, doesn’t end with any clear actions and leaves me feeling like my time has been wasted. It infuriates me to no end. When I found myself leading a team and responsible for holding weekly team meetings once of my biggest concerns was ensuring that these meetings were useful to my team and they all left with a clear sense of purpose and understanding of what was important to the team at that given time. The problem was, I knew what I didn’t like in a meeting, but I didn’t really know what processes and practices I did like or how to effectively implement them in my own meetings. Enter The Harvard Business Review Guide to Making Every Meeting Matter (HBR, 2016).

The book addresses a collection of the most common problems associated with holding a meeting and contains a collection of articles that have been published in the Harvard Business review relating to effective and efficient meetings. Each of the articles is categorised into according to what meeting issue it specifically addresses:

• Setting and communicating the purpose of a meeting,

• Who to invite,

• Creating an achievable agenda,

• Moderating challenging conversations during a meeting,

• Regaining control of a meeting that has run off the tracks,

• Ensuring follow-through of actions set during a meeting

This layout does mean that the book is a bit repetitive at times as you work your way through five different articles of setting and effective agenda. However, most of the articles are written in an easily digestible manner, making it easier to simply scan the articles that have not gripped you for nuggets of gold before moving on to the next article. It also helps that the articles range in length from two pages to 10+. 

At this stage in my career, this is probably the book that has had the greatest impact on my practice as a leader in schools. After reading this book, I was able to put in place a series of adjustments to the way I ran my meetings that resulted in positive feedback from my team. Some of the practices I implemented in my meetings made their way into other team meetings as I either introduced ideas to members of those teams or raved about this book to anyone who would listen. I’m pretty sure that by the end of the year, there were a number of people who probably wanted to clobber me with this book rather than read it!

In terms of how applicable this is to the classroom, it’s not particularly. However, I did introduce some of the meeting protocols explored in this book to the Student Representative Council (SRC) and they were then able to use those protocols to run their own weekly meetings successfully.

I actually really enjoyed reading this book in its entirety, but due to its repetitive nature I can see how this would be frustrating for some people. I think sharing a couple of the articles from each section of the book with new team leaders would be really beneficial to their practice. I also think it could also be useful to share certain articles with your own team members as a way of introducing new meeting protocols and establishing a shared understanding of why and how those new protocols are being used. Overall, I wouldn’t recommend this book for the average classroom teacher, but I would strongly recommend it to anyone who leads a team that meets regularly. A pain-free meetings is, after all, a good meeting. 

Clarity and accessibility: 5/5

Applicability to the classroom: 1/5

Practical examples or case studies: 5/5

Depth of content: 3/5

Overall: 5/5