Not Just Another Meeting

Create a fresh, intentional approach to meetings

When meetings draw employees away from day-to-day tasks but fail to reach their intended outcome, it has huge costs to the organization. All too often, this happens because meetings lack purpose—people gather together to discuss a problem but don’t know how to approach it strategically.

Consider that the typical leader spends at least 10 hours a week in meetings with an average of five people. Now, assume each of those individuals is priced out at $100 an hour. That’s $5,000 a week in meeting costs. Multiply that $5,000 by 50 weeks, then by the 10 top executives. The cost? $2.5 million. Of course, leaders dread the thought of one more ineffective meeting, as do most other workers.

With preparation and intention, you can turn these wasted opportunities into sessions that fully engage participants and teams. In Not Just Another Meeting: Creative Strategies for Facilitation, you will learn how to be intentional about diagnosing what your team requires from a meeting. By expanding your repertoire of what to do and how to do it, you can respond to any situation with calm, certainty, and creativity.

Experienced facilitators and consultants Rodney Napier and Eli Sharp describe 13 classic designs, such as the Future Search, Collapsing Consensus, and Genie in the Bottle. Applying to wide-ranging workplace issues, these designs provide the tools to enable any gathering to solve problems, build trust, and deal with conflict. Accompanying them are animated videos, available online, that allow you to observe exactly how to facilitate each design.

This book shines a new light on situations you’ve taken for granted for years. Break out of your old meeting habits—and actually excite the participants of meetings you lead.

About the Authors

Rodney Napier

For more than 40 years, Rod has had the privilege and challenge to work with teams and organizations on four continents, in more than 20 countries and in every conceivable kind of institution, from convents, hospitals, and corporations to the Army Corps of Engineers, the government of Nicaragua, and Outward Bound. He is currently in his 10th year teaching graduate courses at the University of Pennsylvania in conflict management, executive coaching, and planned change. Along the way, he has authored or co-authored a dozen publications―mostly books―including seven editions of Groups: Theory and Experience, the seminal text for 20 years in the field of group dynamics. His books are theoretically sound, research based, and directed at providing applied, actionable responses to the kinds of problems that regularly face most teams and organizations.

Over the past dozen years, Rod has focused on the skills needed for effective meeting design, along with the strategies that differentiate successful leaders and facilitators from those stuck in the world of predictably boring lectures and PowerPoint presentations. Through the use of videos and animation, Rod and his partner, Eli Sharp, are opening the door for many leaders to a new world of exciting and highly relevant designs and, consequently, meetings of all kinds. In the process they bring years of understanding that almost anyone can now access. All that is required is a willingness to learn, and the courage to risk using new designs and some behaviors that have often lain dormant for many years.

Eli Sharp

Eli Sharp is a recognized expert in Japanese Lean and Six Sigma methodologies. She travels extensively analyzing and improving business, manufacturing, and transactional processes; helping groups to work more effectively together; teaching and facilitating teams; and providing coaching to senior leadership.

Integrating process and systems optimization, group and leadership development, and individual executive coaching, Eli provides a holistic strategy to her clients and various techniques to help individuals, teams, and organizations. Her approach is tailored to meet clients' hard and soft needs.

Everything Eli does is grounded in theory. She draws from engineering, business management, continuous improvement, organizational dynamics, and coaching, and works with the practical application of theory, teaching the tools, analyzing complex issues, and making people's lives easier. Her home is at the Gemba―the Japanese term for “real place” or where the work gets done, with the people who do it. She does not preach solutions from a vacuum.

Eli has built and led many incredible teams over the past 25 years, and performed a solo business turn around her role as plant manager in Puerto Rico. She works hard to provide her clients with tools and skills throughout her engagement, so they continue to grow and succeed independently.

Eli has worked in many manufacturing organizations, including hydraulics, food packaging machinery, and medical devices, and has consulted internationally in organizations as diverse as financial services and healthcare provision. She is adept at tailoring her approach to suit different national, organizational, and industry cultures. Her philosophy is to enter the clients' systems with respect and humility, gather data to fully understand the situation and issues from multiple angles, strategize and plan for specific improvements, then help execute the plan, monitor results, and support sustainability.

Eli holds a master's degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Exeter, and is a Chartered Mechanical Engineer. She has an MBA, specializing in operations management, from the University of Plymouth, and a master's degree in organization dynamics (organizational consulting and executive coaching) from the University of Pennsylvania.