Caterina Kostoula - Hold Successful Meetings

Caterina Kostoula is an executive coach and founder of The Leaderpath, a leadership coaching company. She has worked as a Global Business Leader at Google where she was also a 5-star rated internal coach. She has coached leaders and teams from Google, Amazon, Vodafone and Workable, as well as a number of startups. She is a member of the Forbes Coaches Council and coaches for INSEAD and Hult Ashridge Business School. Her work has been featured in Forbes, Fast Company and Thrive Global.

Caterina holds an MBA from INSEAD and an MSc in executive coaching from Hult Ashridge Business School. She has lived in more than seven countries across America, Europe and Asia and is currently based in London.

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First published by Penguin Business in 2021

Copyright Caterina Kostoula, 2021

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Text design by Richard Marston

ISBN: 978-0-241-48196-7

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the authors and publishers rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

I dedicate this book to my mother, Olga Rakka, for her unconditional love and support.

This book contains many strategies and techniques derived from real-life situations that I have encountered during my coaching sessions. Details have been changed, where appropriate, to protect the privacy of individuals and organizations.

It was a Monday in October 2017. As I looked at my calendar, I felt a tightening in my chest. My day was packed with internal meetings. I was a business leader in the global sales team at Google, based in London, and most of my internal meetings were virtual. Like many of us working in big companies, I suffered from meeting fatigue.

Before every meeting, I braced myself. I felt a desperate need to escape. I would prefer a hundred times to be focusing on my clients, doing my own work or even meeting all of my colleagues individually.

For a long time, I thought it was just me who found internal meetings insufferable. I was wrong and definitely not alone. A staggering 46 per cent of employees would prefer to do almost anything else rather than attend a status meeting 17 per cent of them would prefer to watch paint dry! This is nearly half a trillion dollars for these two countries alone a tremendous loss for their economies and for the profitability of their businesses. Nonetheless, most companies invest little effort in helping people run better meetings.

Early in 2018, I left Google to build my coaching company, The Leaderpath. My mission was to coach leaders in how to maximize their impact and fulfilment, supporting them to connect more meaningfully with themselves and others.

Soon enough, I realized that meetings were often at the centre of my work with my clients. As humans we have two deep psychological needs. The first one is the need to feel valued and accepted (love). The second is the need to feel that we can make a difference (power). When we come together with other people to work towards a common goal, we satisfy both of those needs. When we belong to a cohesive, value-creating team, we feel appreciated and powerful. We can achieve so much more through collaboration than we would on our own.

Nonetheless, most meetings fail to create the right conditions for collaboration. My clients often told me that their meetings were interrupting their real work. Even though they spent their day in back-to-back calls, they complained of silos, disconnect and loneliness. Often, they felt ignored or stressed in their meetings. Meeting dysfunction led to team dysfunction and then to low business performance and misery.

To help my clients build stronger teams, I added team coaching to my services. Soon, I realized I loved running team coaching sessions. I saw my clients getting closer to their colleagues, having the difficult conversations they had been avoiding, and solving long-standing issues. The speed with which we would make progress was so much faster when we had all the players in the room. Participants mentioned that after these sessions they felt a renewed excitement about their work.

At some point, it dawned on me that team coaching sessions were also meetings. The difference was that, unlike most meetings, participants left those sessions with a sense of fulfilment and this positive feeling trickled down to their own teams.

I got curious. What is the difference between mind-numbing meetings and transformative meetings? Could we bring some of the characteristics of team coaching and facilitation to our everyday meetings, to make them more successful?

The complaints I most often hear about meetings fall into three categories.

• They are ineffective these meetings do not achieve their desired outcome or they have no clear desired outcome to begin with.
• They are miserable these meetings are difficult to get through because we feel bored, frustrated or stressed.
• They are too frequent a lot of us have too many meetings.

When your meetings are ineffective and miserable, you feel disconnected and powerless. Your teams and your own time and potential are being squandered.

This book will help you to solve these problems by looking after the Purpose, People and Process of your meetings. Meetings, by definition, are occasions when a group of people come together to discuss and achieve a particular Purpose. In of this book we will look at why so many of the meetings we experience are chaotic, unproductive, boring or frustrating and what to do about it. You will encounter the 4D Meeting Framework that will help you clarify and achieve your meetings Purpose.

In , we will cover how to look after the People and the Process of our meetings. You can only achieve your meetings Purpose when People feel they can bring their true and best selves to the meeting. We will also review Process strategies, including how you can reduce the number of wasteful meetings you have.

As a leader, your job is to guide a group towards a common goal. Bringing people together in real time to achieve a common goal aka having a meeting is arguably one of the most powerful tools in your leadership arsenal. This book will equip you to hold fewer, more successful meetings, which are fun and fulfilling for your participants and yourself. You will also learn how to improve your meetings, even if you are not the organizer yourself.

To accompany the book, I have created the quiz How Successful Are Your Meetings? where you can find out what you do well in your meetings and where you may need to improve. You and your team can take the quiz at www.theleaderpath.com/meetings.