This guidance describes how to schedule hour-long meetings, which are often back-to-back-to-back, in only 45 minutes.

How many days at the office are you in back to back-to-back meetings? At least one day a week, and for some of us, 2 or even 3 or 4. You hate it. It’s often unproductive. Frankly, it’s ALWAYS unproductive.

Why are we doing this to ourselves? There’s a better way.

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This cast concludes our guidance on how to run a Routine Town Hall Meeting for your organization.

We've talked many times about the importance of managerial communications. Our sample communications plan is one of the more requested documents from us. It shows what we recommend a typical manager do in terms of regular comms with her team, using different media and different frequencies and covering different topics.

And, we've mentioned many times Horstman's Law of Organizational Communications: Say something 7 times and half of your people will say they've heard it once. Every organization has its own sandpaper, rubbing away at your meaning.

One way to reach further down and have more control of your message is to conduct a Town Hall meeting. This is the final meeting that Manager Tools would consider "routine", though it's certainly not frequent. It's in the line of Weekly One on Ones, Weekly Staff Meetings, and periodic Skip Levels.

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This guidance describes how to run a Routine Town Hall Meeting for your organization.

We've talked many times about the importance of managerial communications. Our sample communications plan is one of the more requested documents from us. It shows what we recommend a typical manager do in terms of regular comms with her team, using different media and different frequencies and covering different topics.

And, we've mentioned many times Horstman's Law of Organizational Communications: Say something 7 times and half of your people will say they've heard it once. Every organization has its own sandpaper, rubbing away at your meaning.

One way to reach further down and have more control of your message is to conduct a Town Hall meeting. This is the final meeting that Manager Tools would consider "routine", though it's certainly not frequent. It's in the line of Weekly One on Ones, Weekly Staff Meetings, and periodic Skip Levels.

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This guidance describes how to manage work and decisions being done on a project.

Projects are generally governed by Horstman's Law of Project Management: Who does What by When. Sometimes it's a five year project, and sometimes it's 3 weeks. But it boils down to a string of tasks and deadlines, done by humans. And often we humans end up straggling after ripe blackberries when we should be meeting deadlines.

One thing all of us Project Managers can do to keep things on track is to run our project meetings as a Drumbeat Meeting.

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This guidance describes how to manage work and decisions being done on a project.

Projects are generally governed by Horstman's Law of Project Management: Who does What by When. Sometimes it's a five year project, and sometimes it's 3 weeks. But it boils down to a string of tasks and deadlines, done by humans. And often we humans end up straggling after ripe blackberries when we should be meeting deadlines.

One thing all of us Project Managers can do to keep things on track is to run our project meetings as a Drumbeat Meeting.

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This cast concludes our guidance on how to give an update in a staff meeting.

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This cast gives our guidance on how to give an update in a staff meeting.

Over on Manager Tools, we recommend every manager have a weekly staff meeting. They are a key part of socializing a team. In these meetings, each direct gets ten minutes to brief the rest of the team on what they have going on.

What if you're the direct though? What are you supposed to say and how? Speaking in meetings is a key part of demonstrating your strengths, which in turn leads to promotions. It's important to get it right. So, what's right?

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This guidance describes how to run the first meeting you have with your team about a new project your team will be doing.

A manager we know got assigned a project for he and his team a couple of years ago, and he asked us to critique his email that he was sending out to announce the project, both big picture and early assignments. We knew this manager, and knew his team were collocated with him. Why, we thought, would a manager send out a LOOOOOOONG email to his team with LOTS of details about a not unimportant project?

He told us, well, that’s just the way I’ve always done it.

Well, there’s a better way. It’s MUCH more effective to have a brief meeting. It’s called a SPOT meeting, and even though it’s yet another meeting, it’s totally worth it. Here’s how to run one.

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This cast helps you deal with meeting a member of the business who is two or more levels above you in the organization hierarchy.

One of the recommendations we make in Manager Tools is that every manager who has managers below them needs to periodically have a 'skip meeting'. That means she meets with not her directs, but their directs. That's all very well and beneficial for the manager, but it can be intimidating directs' directs. If you find yourself in that position, what can you do to give a good impression and not embarrass yourself?

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This cast concludes our conversation on an even more basic model for effective meetings than in our original guidance.

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