When your leadership team is faced with a major issue, how many interests are sitting at the table? If you’re like most organizations, you have one interest for each person in the room. There’s the CEO’s interest, a Sales interest, a Finance interest, an Operations interest, an HR interest...and on and on.

Search Google for “Meeting Mistakes” and you’ll pull up 52,200,000 results. That’s a lot of meeting mistakes! But after about ten articles you’ll start to see the same mistakes listed again and again. And none of them include some of the biggest meeting problems companies have.

We know that it is healthy to detach from the world occasionally to reflect and spend some quality time with yourself. It is rejuvenating, stress relieving and if you are lucky even downright fun. Try it, completely unplug and focus on you. You owe it to yourself!

I recently checked in on a new client a couple of weeks after their first session with me, and their Integrator was over the moon about how much they’d been accomplishing in their weekly meetings. He said, “We got 10 issues resolved today! Normally, we’d have been hung up and lucky to solve one, but every week, we’re solving things that have been hanging around for months or years, and worse still, the same problems kept recurring. But now we’ve solved them for good, and we can focus on what matters: making our customers happy and growing our business.”

I am sitting in a session with a client and we are making sure to flush out all the issues. The Sales and Marketing Director is going through his list as I write them up on the board and he finishes his list by saying, “and I need to be on the issues list as well.” This gathered a few looks but I told the group that we had bigger fish to fry so we were not going to dive into solving any of the issues just yet. We worked through the day, learning a new tool and setting our Rocks (priorities) for the quarter when we finally got to issue solving. The team’s interest was definitely peaked at this point so we started with the Sales and Marketing Director’s comment. He identified his concerns by saying, “I don’t have the skill set to do this job at the level the company needs.” As we worked through the issue, the group came to the conclusion that he was right and we needed to get a more experienced person for that position. He wasn’t in the right seat. But, then the owner said, “This definitely confirms you are the right person. What seat do you think would be a good fit?”