Fix Bad Meetings with the 50% Rule

I won’t bury the lead here. If you really want to improve your meetings, make sure at least 50% of your meeting time is spent with customers. Not colleagues, not bosses, not vendors. Customers.

Depending on your role and your business, your customer may vary.

• If you make products, your customers are the ones who may buy and use those products.
• If you are in a people-focused internal role, your customers may be employees and staff members.
• If you provide services, your customers are the ones who may use those services.
• If you are a CEO, all of these might be your customers.

If you’re skeptical or think that you already do talk to your customers, take a hard look at your calendar from last week. Really, take a quick look now.

Count up the total number of meetings and note how many were spent directly interacting with your customers. If it’s less than half you are in luck because work is about to get a whole lot better! If you are ready for a change.

At various points in my career, I spent almost no time at all talking with customers. Yet, my calendar was packed from start to finish every single day. No breaks. No buffers.

I’d travel from a project update meeting with one team to a kickoff with another, to a meeting with a potential vendor, to a 1:1 with a team member, to a check in my boss, to another, and another. Throughout my travels, I’d never speak with the actual humans we were all furiously meeting to talk about.

Those meetings got recycled over and over again. I’d deliver the same updates to different internal teams multiple times per week. We’d all debate what our customers wanted. Sure, we’d look at data. We’d see how many were using our products, and which parts they were and weren’t using. Then we’d spend meeting after meeting guessing why our customers were doing what they were doing.?

Decisions were the result of a series of subjective opinions wrestled into a loose consensus.

In other words, we’d guess. Then we’d meet to put together a slide deck of our guesses so we could meet with our bosses to share our guesses and hear their guesses.

We’d capture action items that seemed to always lead to more meetings. More guessing, more repeating, more meetings. It felt pointless.

Somewhere along the way, my boss encouraged me to attend Stanford’s dSchool, a 3-day executive boot camp where I’d learn about Design Thinking.

Those three days were the turning point in my?career.

I learned the single most important lesson of my professional life — how to listen to customers.

I returned full of energy and hope. Then I looked at my calendar and deflated like an old balloon. Every day for the foreseeable future consisted of at least fourteen 30-minute meetings. How could I possibly talk to customers? There were only so many hours in a day.

But I could see a new way so I persisted. It wasn’t easy. It took time.?

My advice to you, if you are willing to make this shift, is to be patient and empathic toward the various people who won’t understand why you want to replace some of those team meetings with customer meetings.

Of course, you’ll still need to meet with your team, but if you can shift some of those meetings to be with customers, something surprising will begin to happen.

Many of those old meetings will become unnecessary.

You won’t have to guess so much about what your customers need and want - because you’ll know. You won’t have to repeat the same consensus-building updates over and over because decisions will become more objective — based on customer input instead of a series of subjective opinions. Bosses will have to guess less. There will be fewer slide decks — hooray!

If you want to improve the quality of your meetings, make sure to spend at least 50% of your meeting time with customers. This will help you get a better understanding of their needs and wants, and it will also make the rest of your meetings more productive and engaging.

It may not be easy to make this shift, especially if you’re used to spending most of your time in meetings with colleagues or bosses. But it’s worth it in the long run. When you’re more focused on your customers, you’ll make better decisions, build better products, and create a more successful business.

Now, who’s ready to take on the 50% challenge?