Review for "Lead Engaging Meetings"
Book By: Jeff Shannon
Reviewed By: Russ Parker
Lead Engaging Meetings: A Practical Guide to maximize Participation and Effectiveness
Pages: 158
Edition: First
Authors Pages:
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Overview of “Lead Engaging Meetings"
If you’re a project manager, you already know: a bad meeting can derail progress faster than a missed deadline.
Jeff Shannon’s Lead Engaging Meetings is the no-fluff guide to running meetings that don’t suck.
To Lead Engaging Meetings, you must act like you are riding an elephant.
This book is not just a “How To” guide, but is a resource for anyone leading meetings.
Each chapter builds upon one another, giving a progressive way to run a meeting from start to finish.
Chapter Breakdown
Chapter 1: How this Guide Will Help You Increase Engagement and Effectiveness
Chapter 2: What Undermines Engagement in Meetings
Chapter 3: Build the Meeting Brief
Chapter 4: Plan for an Engaging Meeting
Chapter 5: Prepare to Lead an Engaging Meeting
Chapter 6: Start the Meeting Strong, with the Right Tone
Chapter 7: Run an Engaging Meeting, Start to Finish
Chapter 8: Troubleshooting Common Meeting Problems
Chapter 9: Tips to Lead Engaging Virtual and Hybrid Meetings
Chapter 10: End the Meeting on a High Note
As you can see, the chapter break down not just how to lead the actual meeting, but the preparations, execution, and followups to the meeting.
But, thats the point, Jeff drives home throughout this book that in leading engaging meetings, the work expands past the time the meeting starts until it ends. Its the work you put in beforehand. The preparation, the gear, and the mindset required to ensure people stay engaged and on point.
Always ending with a high note and a follow on email with all information gained throughout the meeting.
If you struggle with:
- Preparing for meeting
- Laying out the purpose of your meeting
- Keeping people on topic
- Finishing on time
- Pulling out clear accomplishment and action items
Then, this book is a resource you are going to want to put in your library.
Now, this book is geared towards, in my eyes, those larger meetings. Less the daily calls you have with your teams, the quick coordination calls around your schedules, risks, and resources.
This book is what you need for those bigger meetings:
- Kickoff Meetings
- Risk Workshops
- Schedule Development
- Monthly Status Calls with Sponsors/Stakeholders
- Lessons Learned Workshops
- Project Closure Meeting
These are the meetings where you need to have clear agendas, clear goals, and a increased focus of attention to details in, ensuring the team stays on tasks and ready to buid out the plan for the project.
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Who Should Read "Lead Engaging Meetings"?
This book is one of those books that was not built by a Project Manager or with the project management community in mind, but is completely applicable to us.
I’ve sat in way too many terrible meetings. Slides on a screen with a “Lead” talking for 55 out of 60 minutes on the calendar, followed by a Q&A that takes us well over time with no clear goal or feeling we have actually made any progress.
I consider this the least enjoyable part of the job.
But when a meeting goes well. Engagement, constructive conversation, and clear action items show up and show what the team can actually do when their minds come together to focus on a goal.
This book is a blueprint that shows you how to ensure that the meetings you hold as a PM are planned well, setup for engagement, and drive the team into making decisions.
PM’s should read this book before their next project. And they should apply the elements of this book into their Kickoff Meetings and Risk Workshops up front, setting the tone and standard for the rest of the project.
Want the Details in Running a Risk Workshop?
This course provides:
- Comprehensive Instruction
- Templates
- Schedules
- How to Run the Workshop – from planning to post-workshop actions.
What I Enjoyed About The Book:
This is an easy to read book.
It also comes with a video resource where Jeff walks you through everything he teaches in the book. I highly recommend you watch this video, then read the book, and then rewatch the video.
I did this and I think it really put everything into perspective. The video training is not too long and it definitely reinforces the material.
I would like to say that I knew everything going into this book. Being a part of and being the leader in probably hundreds of planning and various other meetings, I would have thought I had everything under control. But this book opened my eyes to various little details that were holding me back. From pre-meeting work to simple engagement ideas for quite participants, this book gets into details I would not have thought to address.
Jeff does a great way at explaining not just the actions you want to take before, during, and after the meeting. He give the “Why” and the “How” in an easy to understand and easy to implement format.
Like ending the meetings on time and adding in a “Buffer” into the schedule. He says a couple times in the book, the one way to destroy a good meeting is by going past the scheduled end point. Instead, he says, make sure that you schedule the meeting so that the last 5-10 are free to release everyone early.
A concept that, as your meeting gets longer in scheduled time, becomes more useful.
Jeff is truly an expert in this field.
I’ve read other books in the past about running meetings, but this book is the simplest breakdown. His concepts aligned to how I already liked to lead these level of meetings, that I know I can easily implement the fine tuning that he gives throughout the book.
Especially the section on “How to Prevent Rabbit Holes” and “How to Cut Off Someone” were two areas I really engaged.
Coming from the military, I sometime purposefully pull back on the Marine Corps directness I’m used to when engaging with people. While Jeff helped align me to a more professional way to interrupt and let people know they are getting off topic.
Overall, I really enjoyed this book.
What I Didn’t Enjoy About The Book:
For project managers, I see the usefulness of this book for leading:
- Kickoff meetings
- Risk workshops
- Large status updates
- And other larger type meetings
What I don’t see in this book is how to run this system when you have 5-6 meetings a day. Although I can see how you can apply the resources and concepts for those levels of meetings, I would have like to see a “How to scale for smaller meetings” chapter.
He hits on Virtual and Hybrid meetings, so I feel like a “shorter” meeting chapter would be useful. A quick chapter on how to lead last minute or shorter meetings throughout the day would have been a nice addition.
Overall Rating:
About the Author
Jeff Shannon
Jeff is an expert in designing and leading highly engaging meetings that enhance participation, generate better ideas, and deliver results.
Leadership teams rely on him as an experienced, trustworthy guide for their most important strategic planning meetings.
Jeff leads over 80 workshops and retreats annually, and his clients include Cargill, Deloitte, Farm Credit System, FNBO, Genentech, Kiewit, Lutz, Macy’s, and Union Pacific.
An author of practical reference guides for business professionals, Jeff’s books include:
Lead Engaging Meetings: A Practical Guide to Maximize Participation and Effectiveness
Hard Work Is Not Enough: The Surprising Truth about Being Believable at Work
Before becoming a professional facilitator, he was the Brand Director of a billion-dollar business at Conagra Brands. In his seventeen years there, he worked in finance, mergers and acquisitions, training and development, and brand management.
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Thank you for checking out this book review for: Lead Engaging Meetings: A Practical Guide to Maximize Participation and Effectiveness
I highly recommend you pick up this book, take notes, and apply some of its contents in your daily life and projects!
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