Course: https://www.udemy.com/course/leading-effective-meetings-you-can-lead-effective-meetings/?couponCode=KEEPLEARNING
Overview
I recently completed a self-paced, lecture-based online course called “Leading Effective Meetings – You Can Lead Effective Meetings,” offered by Udemy and led by TJ Walker. This course covers a wide range of topics designed to teach professionals the skills, techniques, and methods necessary to plan, conduct, implement, and facilitate productive meetings in various settings and sizes. The content spans about 30 hours, divided into nearly 50 sections, including practical exercises and useful resources. As of writing this review, the course costs $109.99, but I enrolled during a sale for just $12.71 – I’m not kidding, Udemy’s deals can be wild!
Why I Took This Course
I’m always looking for ways to learn and teach impactful skills for managing and supporting healthy, productive teams. I’m especially passionate about proactive leadership in government and tech industries. My goal for this course was to gain a more concrete understanding and methodology for running effective meetings.
Meeting with teams and groups is an essential form of communication in any healthy company. While meetings serve many important functions, a common theme in many workplaces is teams dreading them and viewing them as a “necessary evil.” In environments with smart, experienced individuals, structuring the flow of information so everyone is on the same page can be challenging. It’s helpful to add methodologies to your “skillset toolbox” to better extract information in any communication setting. This course provides useful tools and practices to help lead more organized, meaningful meetings.
Key Takeaways
- Meeting Structure & Efficiency: The course emphasizes the importance of context, planning, and structure in meetings. Productivity relies on defining a clear purpose, setting an agenda, and ensuring meetings start and end on time. A helpful example provided was Amazon’s “two-pizza rule” for meetings.
- Engagement Techniques: A significant portion of the course is dedicated to engagement strategies, covering communication forms like handling customers, offering constructive criticism, and interpreting body language. It also includes specific meeting techniques, such as the 20-second initial engagement exercise and limiting the number of attendees to boost participation.
- Presentation Skills: Practical advice is provided for avoiding ineffective PowerPoint use and implementing TED-style speaking techniques. It also covers smaller but important details, like the sequence of your presentation and the content of your slides (in short, minimizing text or using no text at all).
- Alternative Meeting Approaches: The course introduces concepts for various meeting types, such as standing meetings, Amazon’s memo-based meetings, and time-restricted discussions to maintain focus and efficiency. These approaches are adaptable to different settings (virtual, conference, etc.) and situations (getting buy-in, handling difficult conversations, etc.).
Recommendation
I recommend this course for anyone new to the concept of structurally managing meetings as a professional skill. It’s also great for adding to your toolkit of methods and techniques for leading meetings. However, I wouldn’t specifically recommend it for those looking to improve their leadership and communication skills in meetings.
While some sections offer valuable insights on meeting leadership, the course expands into broader communication training, which dilutes its overall focus on meetings. These communication sections are useful but not essential to the course’s core theme. If your goal is to refine meeting facilitation skills, a more focused course would be better. That said, the sections on agenda-setting, engagement techniques, and meeting structure are definitely worth revisiting.
In short, if you have the time and happen to catch it on sale, this course is a great reference!
