South East of England

This event took place on Monday 11 March 2024

Download the quick guide here.

Download the presentation slides here.

If you were asked to think of one of the best moments in your working life, would your mind immediately think of a recent meeting you attended? Probably not. As someone once said, meetings can be events where minutes are taken and hours are wasted. Meetings can, of course, be incredibly effective and useful – but have you ever stopped to think about what makes one meeting great and another terrible? What can you do before the meeting to give it a much better chance of success? What about during the meeting? And what about at the end of the meeting and afterwards?

Nick Salmon calculates that he has probably attended over 25,000 meetings in his career – some as a meeting secretary, many as a participant and a lot as a meeting chair. In this training, he has distilled what he has learned from his experience, combined with occasional insights from published research. The focus is almost exclusively on practical things we can do to make meetings better.

The training starts with things we should do before the meeting takes place. Topics that Nick canters through include: virtual vs. in-person vs. hybrid; good and bad agendas; papers; organising help; surprises; attendees; timings, length and location; and celebrating cancellations and early finishes.

Next comes the meeting itself – here Nick looks at the impact of: start times; energy levels; behaviour expectations; context; structure; inclusion; difficult participants; conflict; commitments; summaries

And finally, Nick looks at what to do afterwards to ensure the meeting is not a waste of time, and how to learn for the next time.

Speaker

Nick Salmon, Chief Operating Officer EMEA, White and Case LLP

Nick is part of the senior management team of business services leaders at White & Case. He has been the EMEA COO since 2013, prior to which he was the Asia COO for White & Case for 4 years and Asia COO for Linklaters for 5 years. He began his career in the Lloyd’s of London insurance market, where he spent 10 years and qualified as a Chartered Secretary whilst acting as a compliance director and company secretary. Nick is a Fellow of the Chartered Governance Institute.

Nick is a frequent trainer in his firm, and is involved in training partners who are taking on senior leadership roles, newly promoted partners, other lawyers and business services colleagues – and brings an energy and humour to his training that can make most topics interesting.

Note that this is not a technical training on, for example, how to manage board meetings with specific duties. Rather, it is practical training of general relevance to the effective management of any type of meeting.