This question of how teams could meet happily day in and day out led me to the coaches. Leadership coaches, team coaches, personal coaches: “It’s all about relationships,” they explained. “If the people in the room can’t trust one another—if they’re anxious, worried, or angry, no amount of fancy facilitation will work. Building relationships matter

PMQ looks at the quality of an individual meeting. Learning to run a meeting well is a worthy accomplishment! Leading one good meeting matters, but as we all know, most meetings are not solitary beasts. Only bad meetings stand alone; failed sales calls and botched negotiations are not joined by a second meeting. The rest of our meetings travel in p

“The aim of the net-positive movement is to encourage businesses to leave the world a better place than they find it.” —Oliver Bach for the Guardian

Study after study has shown that the words we use to describe what we do can have a dramatic effect on what happens next. In his books Influence and Pre-Suasion, Robert Cialdini shares dozens of enlightening examples. In social psychology circles, this phenomenon is called priming or framing. The way you frame a meeting can set the tone and the bou

Using an agenda and sharing notes after a meeting are the equivalent of table manners. They provide just enough meeting etiquette to avoid embarrassment but not enough to bring mastery. You need to learn this stuff, just like you need to learn how to say “please” and “thank you.” But just because you know which fork to use for the salad, it doesn’t

Weekly team meetings often fail because people run them like project status updates instead of team meetings, focusing too heavily on content at the expense of connection, and their teams are weaker for it.

“The Flow” is the name given to a skilled individual’s peak productive state. Great work happens when people are in the flow, a state of deep concentration and productive output that, when achieved, temporarily suspends time. Research conducted by positive psychologist Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi and his international team found there are 10 components

Create a Culture in Which It Is Okay to Make Mistakes and Unacceptable Not to Learn from Them This is Work Principle number three in Ray Dalio’s book Principles. It resonates deeply with me and with the people I’ve met who strive to operate at high performance levels.

We do not learn from experience… we learn from reflecting on experience. —John Dewey, Philosopher and Psychologist