Escaping Meeting Hell By Going Cold Turkey

More than likely, we all have those days where we go from meeting to meeting to meeting with little or no break in between. It gets to be close to 5:00pm and we realize we have not gotten to get to any of our "real" work. And when you think back on the meetings, most of them seem like you might have better spent your time not going to it. And when we think of how many hours per week we lose to these meetings it stacks up pretty quickly.

There have been a lot of articles written on how we are wasting our time with meetings. One of my favorite ones is Coding Horror's "Meetings: Where Work Goes to Die". I really love the illustration he uses and am including it here. It, like so many other great articles, spell out ways to optimize meetings and reduce their footprint.  

 I think there might be another, more radical path worth exploring. Stop having internal meetings altogether, at least for a while. You already have an idea in your head about how much time you lose with meetings, aren't you curious to see how what would happen by abandoning internal meetings for a week or two?  

Just to be clear DO NOT stop having client meetings, I am only talking about internal meeting here. Any time you can get an outside voice to give you feedback or to make a sale, that is likely a very valuable use of time and resources. I am talking about intra- or inter-departmental meetings for status reports, weekly check-ins, clarifications, planning, etc. Could you go cold turkey and still get things done? 

Let's take a step back and think about why meetings are our go-to way to collaborate with our team. As people, we have always done it that way. From the Senate in ancient Greece to the weekly stand up for marketing, we are just used to the idea of getting together in one place, seeing everyone else is present and moving through a discussion of agenda items. There is a certain comfort to it.

But the the point of having a meeting though is never 'just to meet.' It should always be 'getting something done.' What would happen if we tried for the same results with different tactics? 

Getting buy-in from the whole team to try this is a critical step. You can't simply ban meetings without having everyone on board as to why and what the experiment is trying to uncover and solve. Getting everyone on the same page with trying to get more done with less meetings might take a few conversations but I have never met a single person who wants more meetings. However, we almost all want the same basic thing, more results. 

Even without team buy-in, the first planning step you can do without any disruption at all. Go through calendar and ask yourself this set of questions about each and every internal meeting:

1. What am I hoping to walk away with from the meeting? 

 Are you awaiting further instructions or clarifications? Are you looking for acknowledgement that you completed a task? Do you need an opinion about an aspect of what you are doing? Write down the exact things you want out of each meeting you attend. 

2. What am I expected to present or otherwise share knowledge about during this meeting?

 Others have invited you for a reason, do you know why that is? Could you better present this information in a quick video or document? Do you anticipate a lot of Q&A or do you think you can deliver this information more clearly and thoroughly in another format? If so, have you ever attempted to capture it in an alternative way?  

3. Am I using a meeting to delay a decision?

 Sometimes meetings drag on and on and follow up meetings get put on everyone's calendars because 'we need more information' about a topic before pulling the trigger going one way or another. Even if you have a mountain of data, at some point you will have to just do a thing and statistically, you are not always going to be right. Waffling in front of your team over the course of one or several meetings is not good leadership. Getting feedback to inform your decision is though, and I think there are multiple paths there that do not require the whole team talking through every conceivable option and alternative. If you are following the data and have a good set of processes in place, don't hesitate, just act.  

4. Do I understand what the team is doing well enough to delegate without this meeting?

 The answer might not be 'yes' to this, and that is good information for you to have. Ideally the process management strategy you have in place can give you insight into how many hours and to what tasks each person is focusing on for the day, week or month. If you can not tell what your team is doing without having a meeting to ask them, perhaps mapping out how to make that information more visible to yourself would also help the team as a whole with transparency. 

If you go through every internal meeting with these questions, then what you will find yourself with is a set of bullet points about where you are stuck and what you want others to do for you. I urge you to try to get resolution on those points in any way you can outside of a meeting. And if you can get team buy in to try it, simply don't allow internal meetings to be an acceptable path for a while. You might just discover how much you can really get done without them. At worst, you will have a much clearer understanding of what you need to get out of meetings moving ahead.  

There is no magical 'right' way to go about this experiment. There is no one size fits all communication methodology that would fit every team, although mapping out how you get things done for your team is something I think every organization benefits from. From clarity comes better decisions and positive change. Just always ask yourself, do we really need a meeting to get to that clarity. My guess is likely no.  

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