Manage It!

Cancel These Meetings

Your job as the project manager is to protect your team from outside influences and interruptions while helping them make progress toward a reasonable deadline. You can help your team by protecting them from meetings they don’t need to attend. Cancel meetings that are of no value to anyone, and excuse team members from meetings in which they will neither give nor receive any value. You might encounter some resistance from some team members who think you are judging them as not being important enough to attend the meeting. Stress instead that you think they are too important to attend the meeting.

While you are reducing the time at nonproductive meetings for your team members, don’t forget to look for meetings that you ...