Control Your Meetings

Or your meetings will control you!

Do you suffer from Terminal Meetings? You know the ones, where you feel you have died and gone to Bureaucratic Hell? I have several rules for myself in regard to meetings. I have the luxury of controlling more than most possibly, as I chair the majority of my meetings. But these rules have arisen as survival tactics, and may serve you well too.

Do not attend any meeting you are not required for.  Find out what the meeting is actually about from the chair who called it. It should be obvious from the agenda, but quite often the agenda is sent out with little detail, very general, because an agenda is required but no thought has been put into it (no one would do that!!). If the meeting is information passing, decline but ask for minutes - bang you gained one hour! If the meeting is problem analysis and solving, ask what your contribution will need to be, to see if you will have actual value in attending. If it is your boss's meeting you likely have little choice. In that case you can volunteer to be the time keeper - this gives you half a chance to cut off the long talking windbags who insist they are the smartest kids in class, and its a better job than taking minutes.

Note on taking minutes - if you control the minutes you can interpret and write what you think is correct, and have a chance to avoid the ugly tasks. DO NOT send minutes out for review, it is a waste of time and pointless. No one reads them anyway, they just look for action items. If you play the Review game they will sit around forever and never be published. DO ensure you include Action Items in the minutes, they must include the TASK, WHO is assigned, and the DUE DATE. I copy the Action Item section into the body of the email I send out, no one reads the minutes anyway. The minutes are to record decisions, to leave an audit trail of how you collectively made the wrong decision.

Do not have meetings to pass info - use email. The only exception to this rule is senior Leader meetings where important announcements may be made that impact people. If nothing else the Face Time is important, make sure you ask ONE (only) relevant question if given the opportunity, and make it about the business. Info passing meetings are a waste of time.

Do not attend a meeting without a pre agenda. Do not go into a meeting cold without knowing what the topic is. If there is no agenda you do not know if you are interested, or will find or offer value. If you don't know what it is about, you are not interested. Again the only exception are senior Leader meetings. Be prepared if you must go, it does not take very long to get some Intel or look into the problem so you can add better value to the discussion. Be clear, concise, relevant and brief, you will be a rock star.

Do not attend a meeting that does not have a clear focus - what is the problem? What is the goal of the meeting? Avoid any general discussion meetings, they are as bad as info passing meetings. If there are too many topics in a meeting it will drag on and on, especially if it is a topic that invites discussion from everyone, OR your company culture demands input from every imagined stakeholder (the project manger's nightmare).

If you are definitely trapped in a meeting for the duration, tap the chair at the beginning quietly and let them know you have another meeting starting at the end time of this meeting, so if it is running long you will have to excuse yourself. If they are not your boss you are likely home free.

Do not invite anyone who will not add value. Assuming you chair the meeting, send out your meeting agenda and clearly state what the meeting is about. Make sure you have focus, and invite the people who can actually help solve it. Give them enough information so they can be prepared to identify, analyze and solution, or at least ask more intelligent questions to research.

Technical teams. I have been involved in discussions with team leads and project managers who insist everyone stay off their phone in a meeting. This is practically impossible for technical people, especially for an hour; their world moves too fast. You will find they rarely attend meetings because they simply cannot be disconnected form their job for that long. If you can get their manger to force them to come, you will likely only get one to attend as the sacrifice, and speak for the group. I find forcing this policy pointless.

It is not being rude that they are on their phone. If they are sitting for a period of time in a meeting, they are not likely engaged with you the whole time. They can eaily burn off several tasks every 5 minutes and stay caught up, so their stress goes down. When the meeting gets to a part where they need to be involved, bring them back in and discuss it, and they can contribute. I look at it not so much as they are not present, but they are linked to their wider group, so they are bringing everyone else into the meeting. I have seen this work. There have been times where we discuss something, someone asks a question, and no one knows the answer. The tech guy says " just a minute", then texts one of his group, and in 2 minutes or less we have the answer and carry on. This is actually highly efficient, and much better than recording the question, going away to find the answer and then talking about it next week.

In Practice.

I have a distributed project team so the “ weekly update meeting” is on the phone. I create the agenda from the last minutes, and these are included in the meeting invite. Prior to my meeting the agenda is copied to an email, and I update the notes with any information I will pass on. I also include information from other members who cannot attend but I have chased them for an update. This set of new minutes is then updated during the meeting; they are sent out as the new minutes within ten minutes of the end of the meeting. The minutes include clear action items assigned to people with due dates and the Action Item section is copied to the body of the email.

Ground Rules. Start the meeting On Time. Goal - meeting duration is 15 minutes. Any discussion between a couple people becomes offloaded to afterwards by the affected parties to solve then send me the result. Anyone who does not need to be at the meeting can send me an update the day before, I will pass those notes on and include in the minutes, and then you are excused from the meeting. My updates are in the minutes prior to the meeting.  I colour code actions - Yellow is a task that is due, Green is a task completed since last time. People with tasks get their name in BOLD, lucky!

Currently I can usually stick to the 15 minute time limit, and send the minutes out as the last person is hanging up the phone.

Ultimate goal - I'm training everyone to send me their update the day before, then I can cancel the meeting, and send out the minutes for the meeting we never had!!