Episode #466: Business Meetings Are Mostly Ridiculous

When you mention the word “meetings” to people in business, their eyes often start to roll. Why is that? Usually because they feel there are too many meetings and that the meetings they attend are not effective nor worth the time being spent. Given meetings have been around forever, you have to wonder why we haven’t done a better job yet on arranging our meetings so that they are effective. Not all meetings are created equally and I think this is where we get confused. There are very simple information sharing meetings and then at the other end of the scale, we have heavy duty, world changing, strategic meetings which will determine the fate of the enterprise over the next decade or more.

The complexity of the meetings should reflect the scale of time required and the number of people needed to attend, but often it doesn’t. Many times, we are allocating too much time and requiring too many people for meetings. These simple meetings could either be replaced with an email or could be severely truncated in terms of the time impost. The bracket of one hour seems to have become the default period for meetings and as we know from Parkinson’s Law, the content will expand to fill the time. Let’s go back to the very basics of meetings, what we need to be doing and let’s look at the different phases of the meeting.

Pre-Meeting Considerations:

1. Clarify the purpose. This sounds simple enough, but often meetings are a hotchpotch of loosely defined purposes. We need to make sure we are clear about the prioritisation of items we are going to address. This becomes important especially if we run out of time. Do we even need to have this meeting or can we replace it with a simple inform style email or video or audio?

2. Determine attendees, location and length. Japan loves to invite everyone to the meeting, but who is really, really required? Can we let others with a minor interest share the minutes, so that they are kept up to date, but we don’t take up their valuable time. As mentioned earlier, why does the meeting have to be one hour long? Often we can save a lot of time by fixing a shorter schedule for the meeting, say 40 minutes in length. When you do the calculation of shaving twenty minutes off each meeting being held during the day, the numbers are tremendous in terms of the time saving. Do we need to be sitting down? Could we meet standing up, because the physical discomfort inspires people to have shorter get togethers?

3. Reserve space, clarify the room setup, equipment needs, food and beverages etc. In large companies, there is a perennial Darwinian struggle for meeting room availability. You see seriously unhappy people milling around outside, looking to foment a storming of the room if you don’t buzz off. Why not be well organised so that we can finish slightly early and be gracious with our colleagues. Most rooms have all the equipment needed but do we have the expertise to use it? Often the tech defeats us and we have no recourse to get help. Usually the more high tech, the more the difficulties. So it is better we deal with the tech issues before the meeting so we don’t squander everyone’s patience and time.

4. Anticipate and plan for potential questions and resistance. Like any presentation the best way to deal with pushback is to deal with it during our presentation and not wait for the Q&A. We select the likely objections to what we are suggesting and demolish them with solid, inarguable, damming evidence.

5. Prepare and distribute an agenda. This sounds obvious, but how many meetings have the agenda sent out before everyone gathers together, rather than it lying on the table when we arrive? Get it to people early, so they can be thinking about the content, before they get into the room. It also precludes any excuses for not being on top of the topic.

6. As the meeting organiser, arrive early to check everything is ready. Sometimes the set up isn’t as we need it or the equipment isn’t working properly. Better to get there early and deal with it all before others arrive.

During the Meeting:

1. We should be disciplined and begin and end on time. That means we don’t wait for people who arrive late. At a previous company, I was astonished to see people swanning in fifteen minutes late, coffee in hand, unashamedly looking around for a seat. Ignore these oafs and start on time. Don’t put up with it. One school of thought is to prepare less chairs, knowing certain habitual offenders will arrive late. They will work out they better get there on time, if they don’t want to stand throughout the meeting. Speak to them separately about their tardiness and lack of professional commitment to the rest of the team’s valuable time.

2. If we cannot complete all the items, we simply make note of the details and move them to the next agenda, so that nothing falls between two stools.

3. We need a nominated person to keep the minutes, so that we all have a record of what was decided. This arm twisting should be done before the meeting, because no one wants to volunteer for more work.

4. Encourage everyone to participate. The same three most confident people can take over the discussion and a lot of good ideas from those more quiet or introverted people can be lost. As the meeting leader, purposely draw out silent people to make their comment and contribute. Also summarise what has been decided before moving on the next items, so everyone is clear on what is going on.

5. Set out the rules of engagement at the start of every meeting. Make it a rule that no one interrupts anyone when they are speaking. Make it a meeting law, that we all consent to disagree agreeably. Meetings can become gladiatorial spectacles as ambitious people try to elbow their way to the top, using the opportunity to show they are only one in the room who has a clue, or so they think.

6. Make it clear who has to do what and by when, for post meeting action follow-up. If this step is missed, then there is insufficient utilization of the time allocated and all of the resources which have been used up.

Post-Meeting:

1. Distribute the minutes quickly, so everyone is reminded of what was decided and who has which accountabilities. The action items to be reported on at the next meeting have to be made inarguably clear, because some people are total ninjas at dodging responsibility.

2. Check the designated timelines for task completion and track whether they have been achieved.Legitimate delays can happen and we need to allow for that, by not establishing such tight deadlines that a whole swathe of knock-on effects will kick in uninvited.

3. Self-evaluate the meeting and have others give you their assessments.This rarely happens because we are all busy and we just quietly move on. Like anything in business, some reflection on how it was done and the value of the time spent is a useful method of generating improvements. Become known as the Master of Meetings.

Meetings will happen anyway, so we have a choice as to whether they will continue as a major waste of time or whether we will make them an engine for the growth of the organisation.