Dear Leader, your meetings suck - Change my mind.
Meetings, done well, can be really useful for teams.
But you? You suck at meetings. #Sorrynotsorry.
Billions of dollars annually are burned in meetings; just think about how many meetings you attend in a week and take a guess at the hourly rate of the people in the room. Those are expensive conversations. I put it to you that a good percentage of those are unnecessary or ineffective. Imagine the bottom-line impact of that inefficiency. COOs, do the math.
“Not me, my meetings are rock solid”
If you thought that then either you’re a unicorn or delusional. Research suggests that the person doing most of the talking in a meeting will rate the quality of the meeting higher than the quiet observers. Since in a good number of meetings the person calling and leading the meeting is the doing most of the talking it’s no wonder leaders have a blind spot to their ineffectiveness.
Before you embarrass yourself arguing with me, I challenge you to gather some data. Shoot out an anonymous survey to meeting participants after 5 meetings. One question:
“do you feel this meeting was effective – yes or no”
You could ask for constructive feedback but chances are you will spend more time trying to guess who said what so you can secretly rebut them and make yourself feel better. So don’t, yet.
Once reality is staring you in the face you have a couple of options. Accept its your problem to solve or give the rest of us a hard time. The comment section is right there; your choice
If you’re still reading then I’m willing to bet you might not admit it openly, but you know deep down that your team would benefit from some leadership from you on this topic. Kudos to you, recognising a problem is the first step. Let’s talk about
Your meetings are too long
Parkinsons law says "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion". Consider your USB drive or mobile phone storage. When you get the message that its near full; chances are you’ll delete something but until then you just keep filling it. In a similar vein, it’s a safe bet you’re running meetings to an artificial boundary, increments of 30 minutes and the meeting will run until the time allocated expires.
Try this experiment; half the meeting time for every meeting next week. Give all the attendees a heads up in advance. Keep each meeting on topic and ruthlessly keep to the topic.
You have no agenda or its rubbish
What I see in many organisations is that agendas are made up last minute for the sake of one or they are recycled standing agendas that became stale a week after they first ran.
Try this; the day before the meeting, ask attendees what topics they’d like to discuss. Rank the responses in priority order so you’re sure to cover the most important topics and send out the agenda at close of business so everyone has time to consider their contribution to the topics. If you have only a few responses? Bonus, shorten the meeting time. If you have no responses cancel. If it turns out you’re the only person with something to say, consider if a meeting is appropriate at all. You might be better served with an email or wiki post.
There’s too many people for the meeting to be productive
If we’ve learned anything from enforced isolation during the pandemic it’s the value of human interaction. So if the intent of the meeting is to disseminate information it shouldn’t be a meeting. The value of ‘meeting’ is the ability to interact intimately; you can’t do that with more than 7 other people. Less is more in the meeting game.
Steve Jobs is famous for, amongst many things, being ruthless with meeting size. He went so far as to decline an invitation with the US President because he felt the quorum was too large.
So, rule of thumb – if one pizza couldn’t feed the meeting its time to cull. If you have people frustrated by ‘not being included’ then have the tough conversation – you’re a leader right?
You’ve inequitable contribution from all attendees
News flash! Some people are introverts. Not everyone is comfortable voicing an opinion or surfacing a unique perspective in a meeting forum. But what they are good at is intently listening and forming ideas. If you’re asking someone to spend their time with you then surely you value their input; so why would you let someone dominate the conversation and forgo the introverts insight?
You can encourage the quieter members of the team to come out of the comfort zone and speak up with a few of simple techniques
You already circulated the agenda right? Good! Then the thinker will have time to think before the meeting.
Let them think – perhaps encourage them to express their opinion later in the conversation after they’ve had time to consider the other opinions in the room (just don’t forget to invite them to the conversation)
If topics or ideas a controversial ask everyone to stop talking and instead write down their ideas on post-it notes anonymously; then you introduce the ideas to the conversation and moderate the discussion.
If someone isn’t contributing because they’re simply disengaged then there’s a sign you have some work to do after the meeting. Don’t let that go.
Your meetings start late, or attendees take a while to focus
In some organisations this is a plague. It seems culturally acceptable for meetings to start 15 minutes late, “Sorry my last meeting ran over” – Sound familiar? Or people arrive in time but they’re still mentally engaged in the last meeting or activity.
Break the habit!
Here’s some ideas to shake things up:
Get creative – TINYpulse software do something innovative – they start meetings at peculiar times. By way of example their daily staff meeting starts 8:48am. Apparently nobody forgets!
Play some music or have a kick-off ritual that requires everyone to engage. This forms the mental break from whatever previous activity was on the minds of the team when they walked in.
The meeting starts on time; if you’re late, you’re out. Shut the door once the meeting starts. You can do this virtually too using the lobby feature on most conferencing software. If you’re really disciplined or determined to change the behaviour try cancelling the meeting if you can’t form a quorum. Again, as the leader, you can deal with the tardiness with a tough conversation later – don’t devalue you precious time together with distractions from people who couldn’t get organised or a lack of diversity of thought to be useful.
Your meetings lack focus and engagement.
Stop multitasking. If you are in the room together you close laptops and put phones down. Find a way to achieve the same virtually. Call each other out for poor behaviour – after all its disrespectful to the others. You’ll get out of the meeting quicker if you focus. If it happens often chances are the meeting is considered unnecessary. Have a think about that.
Conclusion
So, there you have it – your meetings suck. There’s too many people, they’re too long, they have no real agenda, they start late and people don’t focus or engage. That’s on you.
Good news is you can do something about it. Do you team and your boss a favour, sort it out. Secretly or overtly they’re desperate for more time to do valuable work. There’s absolutely value in meetings but not all meetings are valuable.
Oh, and when you do experiment with something, re-run the feedback survey and see if you’ve moved the dial. This time feel free to ask for constructive feedback specific to what you changed. Sometimes just asking people to recognise you tried to make a positive change will lift engagement and asking for their input to make the change better will encourage positive contribution to a solution rather than a useless whinge.
If you’re looking for more on the topic, the inspiration and main source for this article is Steven G Rogelberg’s book ‘The Surprising Science of Meetings’. Definitely check it out.