Christopher Chelpka

This is entry 2 of the blogchain Better Leading, Better Meeting.

At the most general level, any good book on leadership will give you insights that you can apply to meetings. At the most specific level, you’ll find resources that share advice for specific kinds of meetings such as family worship, coaching, or teaching. For organizational meetings, Lucid Meetings has created an insightful taxonomy of organizational meetings and offers advice on each kind.

In between these two levels of guides are books that focus on meetings but in a more general way. These books are where you ought to start. They provide advice for any gathering and a framework into which more specific advice can fit.

If you’re not in a hurry, start with The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters by Private Parker.¹ It’s very good. If you have an important meeting soon and need some advice and right now, skim Let’s Stop Meeting Like This: Tools to Save Time and Get More Done by Dick and Emily Axelrod,² and then study it later as soon as you can. If if your meeting is tomorrow, the Economist summarizes the most important points in How to Lead Better Meetings.

Finally, I recommend Five Gears: How to Be Present and Productive When There Is Never Enough Time by Jeremie Kubicek and Steve Cockram.³ It’s not directly about meetings, but it provides basic categories for thinking about the different ways we spend time with others.

Not all learning, however, comes from books. Nothing can replace serving with and under leaders who can show you the way you want to go and are the kind of person you want to be. Leaders like this have blessed me beyond what I can say.