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Why Most Meeting Training Gets It Spectacularly Wrong (And What Actually Works)
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I've been watching managers destroy productivity for over two decades now, and nowhere is this more obvious than in meeting rooms across Sydney, Melbourne, and every office in between. While everyone's busy attending "Meeting Management for Leaders" workshops and downloading the latest collaboration apps, they're missing the blindingly obvious truth: most meeting problems aren't about process or technology.
They're about power.
Back in 2003, I was running a team of 12 in a manufacturing outfit in Newcastle. Our weekly "alignment meetings" were legendary for all the wrong reasons. Three hours of circular discussions, people checking phones, and me desperately trying to follow some leadership manual I'd picked up at a conference. Sound familiar?
The turning point came when our grumpiest senior technician, Gary, walked out mid-sentence whilst I was explaining our new "parking lot" system for managing off-topic discussions. "This is absolute rubbish," he said. "We're adults. Just tell us what you need and let us get back to work."
Gary was right. But not for the reasons you might think.
The Training Industry's Biggest Lie
Here's what every meeting management course will tell you: create agendas, stick to time limits, assign action items, follow up. Standard stuff. Corporate gospel.
Here's what they won't tell you: 73% of meeting dysfunction stems from unaddressed hierarchy issues and personality conflicts that no amount of process will fix. I've seen more meetings destroyed by one passive-aggressive team member than by poor agenda design.
The real problem? Most Australian workplaces are still operating like it's 1987. We've got this weird cultural thing where we're simultaneously informal ("no worries, mate") and desperately hierarchical (the boss always speaks first, longest, and loudest). Meeting training completely ignores this contradiction.
I learned this the hard way during a consulting gig in Perth. Brilliant team, terrible meetings. The official problem was "time management." The actual problem was that the department head had a habit of hijacking every discussion to share war stories from his days at BHP. Everyone was too polite to shut him down, so meetings became three-hour therapy sessions.
Traditional meeting training would have suggested clearer agendas and stricter facilitation. What actually worked? I had a quiet word with the department head about his storytelling tendencies. Problem solved in one conversation.
The Melbourne Café Test
Want to know if your meeting culture is broken? Try this: could you have the same conversation in a busy café in Fitzroy? If the answer is no – if you need special rooms, formal processes, and elaborate technology – you're probably overthinking it.
The best meetings I've ever attended felt like conversations between smart people who respected each other. No "parking lots," no elaborate status updates, no death-by-PowerPoint presentations. Just humans solving problems together.
That's not to say structure is useless. But most meeting training puts the cart before the horse. You can't process your way out of fundamental communication problems.
Take last month's session I ran for a law firm in Adelaide. They'd hired three different consultants to fix their "meeting efficiency issues." Hundreds of hours of training, new software, revised protocols. Still having awful meetings.
The breakthrough came during a coffee break when I overheard two partners arguing about a client case. Sharp, direct, passionate discussion. They solved in five minutes what their formal meetings had been circling around for weeks.
"Why can't you talk like that in the boardroom?" I asked.
Silence.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Meeting Roles
Every meeting training workshop loves to talk about roles: facilitator, timekeeper, note-taker, the works. It's very neat and orderly. Very German.
But Australian workplace culture doesn't really work that way. We're inherently suspicious of too much formality. When you assign someone to be the "timekeeper," half the room immediately starts resenting the artificial authority you've just created.
Better approach: Acknowledge that every meeting has natural influencers, natural summarisers, and natural troublemakers. Work with these tendencies instead of against them. The person who always asks awkward questions? Don't try to shut them down – use them to stress-test your ideas.
I was working with a tech startup in Brisbane where the founder kept complaining about one developer who "derailed every planning meeting." Turns out this developer was the only one brave enough to point out when the timelines were completely unrealistic. Instead of managing him out of meetings, we started using his pessimism as a reality check. Suddenly, their project estimates became accurate for the first time in two years.
The training industry wants you to believe that meetings are like machines – if you just get the process right, everything will run smoothly. But meetings are more like jazz ensembles. You need some structure, sure, but the magic happens in the improvisation.
What Actually Moves the Needle
After twenty years of this, here's what actually makes meetings work:
Start with trust, not process. If people don't trust each other, no amount of agenda discipline will help. Conversely, when trust is high, you can get away with remarkably informal approaches. Some of my best project teams barely had meetings at all – just regular check-ins and collective problem-solving sessions.
Embrace constructive impatience. Australians generally don't like wasting time. Use this cultural trait instead of fighting it. When someone's getting restless, it's usually because the conversation has stopped being useful. Pay attention to these signals.
Kill the performative stuff. Round-robin status updates. Mandatory brainstorming sessions. Team-building icebreakers. If it feels forced, it probably is. Focus on real problems that actually need group input.
The most productive meeting I attended this year lasted twelve minutes. Senior leadership team at a manufacturing company in Geelong, discussing a quality control issue. No slides, no formal agenda, no assigned roles. Just six experienced professionals sharing information and making a decision.
Compare that to a "strategic planning session" I observed last month. Four hours, professional facilitator, elaborate workshop materials. Outcome? A list of priorities that could have been written by ChatGPT and commitment levels somewhere between lukewarm and nonexistent.
The Technology Trap
Don't get me started on meeting technology. Every week there's some new platform promising to revolutionise how we collaborate. Meanwhile, some of the smartest people I know still prefer whiteboards and Post-it notes.
The problem with meeting tech isn't the technology itself – it's the assumption that tools solve cultural problems. I've seen teams spend more time configuring their collaboration software than actually collaborating.
Zoom fatigue is real, but it's not really about Zoom. It's about the fact that we've translated all our bad meeting habits into a digital format. Boring meetings don't become interesting just because everyone's in a different location.
That said, when technology genuinely serves the conversation – shared documents that everyone can edit, simple polling tools for quick decisions, screen sharing to review actual work – it can be powerful. The key is using it to enhance human communication, not replace it.
A financial services firm in Canberra transformed their meetings by switching from presentations to collaborative document editing. Instead of one person talking while everyone else zones out, they work together on shared problems in real-time. Engagement went through the roof.
The Perth Airport Revelation
I was stuck at Perth Airport last year, waiting for a delayed flight, when I overheard a fascinating conversation. Three consultants from different firms, thrown together by circumstance, solving a complex logistics problem for their mutual client. No formal meeting structure, no designated facilitator, no action item tracking.
Just three smart people building on each other's ideas.
They accomplished more in thirty minutes than most project teams manage in a full-day workshop. Why? Because they had genuine expertise, a real problem to solve, and no organisational politics to navigate.
This is what meetings should feel like. Not performance theatre, not bureaucratic ritual, but genuine collaboration between competent professionals.
The Feedback Loop Problem
Here's something most meeting training gets backwards: they teach you to ask for feedback about the meeting process ("How did we do with time management today?") when you should be asking about the meeting content ("Did we actually solve anything useful?").
Process feedback creates process obsession. Content feedback creates better outcomes.
I worked with a mining company where their project meetings had become elaborate exercises in checking boxes. Perfect agendas, colour-coded action items, detailed follow-up emails. And consistently mediocre project results.
The shift came when we started ending every meeting with one simple question: "What concrete progress did we make today?" Suddenly, meetings became shorter, more focused, and dramatically more effective.
The paradox: when you stop worrying so much about meeting management, your meetings often get better managed automatically.
What I Got Wrong (And What I Learned)
For years, I bought into the meeting methodology approach. Spent ridiculous amounts of time creating templates, refining processes, and training people on facilitation techniques. Some of it worked, sure, but I was missing the forest for the trees.
The biggest shift in my thinking came from watching a particularly effective CEO in Darwin. He ran the most productive leadership meetings I'd ever seen, but when I asked him about his methodology, he looked genuinely puzzled.
"I just make sure we're talking about the right things with the right people," he said. "Everything else sorts itself out."
Simple. Obvious. Revolutionary.
The insight: great meetings aren't about perfect process management. They're about creating conditions where intelligent people can do their best thinking together.
The Brisbane Banking Example
Last year, I worked with a banking team in Brisbane that was struggling with decision-making speed. Their risk committee meetings were legendary for their length and inconclusiveness. Standard meeting training would have focused on decision-making frameworks and structured facilitation.
Instead, we discovered that the real issue was information asymmetry. Three committee members had deep technical knowledge, two had regulatory expertise, and one had customer insight. But they'd never explicitly acknowledged these different perspectives or figured out how to integrate them effectively.
The solution wasn't better meeting management – it was better meeting composition. We restructured the discussions around these different expertise areas, and suddenly decisions became faster and more robust.
The lesson? Sometimes the problem isn't how you're meeting, it's who's in the room and why.
Beyond the Workshop Mentality
The training industry loves workshops because they're scalable and measurable. You can train fifty people in meeting management techniques, give them certificates, and tick the professional development box.
But real meeting improvement happens through observation, experimentation, and gradual cultural shifts. It's messy, unpredictable, and hard to put in a training manual.
The most effective meeting interventions I've seen were small and specific: changing the room layout, starting with different questions, eliminating certain types of updates, or simply having fewer meetings overall.
A construction firm in Hobart cut their weekly project meetings from two hours to forty-five minutes by eliminating status reports that could be shared via email. Productivity increased, morale improved, and project coordination actually got better because people started having more informal conversations.
The Adelaide Advertising Agency Insight
I was working with an advertising agency in Adelaide where creative meetings had become stale and predictable. Instead of bringing in a creativity consultant or brainstorming specialist, we tried something radical: we stopped having "creative meetings" altogether.
Instead, they started having creative conversations. Spontaneous, unscheduled discussions that happened when inspiration struck. The difference was remarkable – more innovative ideas, higher energy, and better buy-in from the whole team.
Sometimes the best meeting management technique is meeting elimination.
The point isn't that all formal meetings are bad. Some decisions genuinely require structured discussion with documented outcomes. But many organisations default to formal meetings when informal collaboration would be more effective.
The Real ROI of Better Meetings
Here's what nobody talks about in meeting training: the emotional cost of bad meetings. I've seen talented professionals become cynical and disengaged because they spend too much time in pointless discussions.
Good meetings aren't just about efficiency – they're about respecting people's time, intelligence, and contribution. When you get this right, everything else improves: morale, retention, innovation, customer service.
A professional services firm in Sydney calculated that improving their meeting culture saved them eight hours per employee per week. That's equivalent to hiring 20% more staff without increasing payroll costs.
But the real benefit wasn't the time savings – it was the restoration of trust in leadership and renewed enthusiasm for collaborative work.
The irony is that most meeting training focuses on techniques and tools when the real leverage is in leadership behaviour and organisational culture. You can't train your way out of fundamental respect and communication issues.
Bottom line: stop looking for meeting management silver bullets. Start creating environments where smart people want to think together. Everything else is just details.
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