Get up, stand up — How to manage meetings effectively in the knowledge economy
Meetings used to be simple and relatively popular. You sat and you listened to the update and you carried on with your work at the end of the meeting.
In the knowledge economy, nothing is linear and so the classic meeting format of sitting at a board table has spawned dozens of new kinds of meeting scenarios to accommodate its abstract nature.
You often read blog posts about how to avoid meetings or introducing some way to make them shorter so that you can get out of them faster.
This is fine, I guess. But if you're a people person; you value working through issues collaboratively; or you value building knowledge (the capital of the knowledge economy) with others, this is rarely the best solution.
Let's call each thing, as Boris Pasternak said, by its right name: meetings are not inherently bad, people's lack of leadership in meeting scenarios, is.
Given that I am the CEO of a company that trades in knowledge, here are my tips for running effective meetings in a knowledge economy.
Have an agenda clear in mind, share that agenda often
One of the most common mistakes that people make in meetings is not clearly defining the goals and the structure of the meeting that is about to happen.
If you only take one tip from this post, let it be this one.
Defining an agenda for yourself and for the group is easy. All you need to do is ask yourself: 'What do I/we need out of this meeting and what are the items that need to be addressed?'
Write down bullet points for the answer to that question and hey presto! You're an agenda master.
Well, not quite.
There are two more steps to setting the agenda for the meeting and those are:
- Ensure that you establish rough timeframes for discussion and
- Constantly repeat the agenda in the meeting itself
Firstly, if you don't establish some expectation of timings for each point in the discussion you are likely to end up spiralling because most people have a tendency to get hung up on details. If a discussion should take 15 minutes and you don't tell everyone explicitly that it should take 15 minutes, you will talk for 30 minutes. This principle is almost universally true of meeting scenarios.
Secondly, constantly repeating the agenda in the meeting will ensure that you stay on track. What does that look like in practice?
Not difficult. You're just saying, 'What we need to get to is xyz and to do that, we'll address issue a for 15 minutes, then b for 5 minutes and then c for 20 minutes.' Then after you've dealt with issue a, you remind people: 'Great. So now that we've done a we're a little closer to xyz. We've got about 25 minutes left and we need to address issue b and issue c.'
It feels dumb at first but I promise that this will make everyone feel better about the meeting when you all leave the discussion.
Don't believe me? Give it a go.
Work out the key metrics for change as quickly as possible
Building on that last point, working out the key metrics for change will allow you to focus your efforts on what actually matters.
The management saying is: what gets measured gets managed.
And it's true.
If you establish clear goals and you continue to remind people of those goals, you will all be able to focus on building towards those goals.
Do you need to get a decision made on a topic? Then establish that as the goal.
Do you want to increase sales by x amount? You're going to need to quantify the steps towards that in the meeting.
Stay focused and we can all get out of here on the double!
Do your research before a meeting to ensure that there are as few factual questions as possible
People say that there is no such thing as a dumb question. I can tell you that while this is a nice thing to say, it is totally untrue.
I started my career as a journalist writing profile pieces on academics. The most basic piece of advice I would give anyone on interviewing people is: if you can google the answer to a question, don't waste anyone's time by not doing this.
In a corporate context: if you can find out the answer before a meeting, do it. If you do not, you are wasting time and money.
Let's say there are 10 people in a meeting and on average their day rate is ￡300. That's a corporate rate of ￡3,000. Now let's say the meeting lasts one hour: ￡375 of the corporate rate.
Every dumb question you ask takes a minute to ask and one minute to answer (if you're lucky.) If you're unlucky, a question might also spark a discussion and you will end up wasting 5 minutes per question. Your dumb question just cost your business ￡31.25. Congratulations. Now multiply that by asking 5 questions and you have just wasted half a day of your own day rate in time-cash value.
How can you avoid this horrific scenario?
Spend five minutes thinking about what you don't know and then work out the fastest way to answer the questions: refer to your company documentation, check your web based systems, google some things, talk to some other hümans.
This is significantly more efficient than asking questions in the meeting itself that could have been answered before hand.
Show your work before hand and share your reading too
Another way to avoid the kind of grunt work that is often done in meetings is by establishing your thinking in a briefing document before the meeting.
Again, this does not need to be complex and you can do it in any way that you like.
You can write a one pager in simple terms establishing the reason for the meeting and what you want to achieve. This should more or less be an expanded version of your agenda. So if you don't have an agenda, WHY ARE YOU READING THIS? Go and do that thing first. It is the best tip here.
Now that we live in a world where its easy to produce a video or an audio file (on your phone), you could be even more efficient and briefly film yourself talking about the reason for the meeting. Send it to the other attendees and they can watch it in advance.
There's really no excuse for not setting out your thoughts clearly.
Because I like to write (you may have noticed), I tend to set out my thoughts in a briefing document as well as an agenda.
Be ruthless with everyone’s time and actively cut out time wasting
Life is short. If you can't do something about a topic that is being raise by an attendee in the meeting, or they are deviating from the agenda, politely say: 'That's interesting. Let's definitely come back to that in the near future.'
The most effective leaders I know will be brutal about this if a person continues to 'offend.' They will not even acknowledge that a person is time wasting and they will redirect the conversation before any one else has a chance to hijack the meeting any further.
Let's not forget: if it's not on your agenda, it's a topic for a different day. Every time a delegate wastes time, they're wasting the time by a factor of the number of delegates in the meeting. It's not a multiple of 1.
Work out who is the responsible person
A common error in knowledge work is for the conversation to become so ethereal or nonlinear that there is no action taken at all.
To stop this from happening, designate a 'responsible person' early in the discussion.
This person's duties are clear:
- Steer the group towards a collective decision
- Own or delegate the actions that come out of the discussion
- Ensure that focus is maintained
Not doing this is risky. It doesn't even have to be agreed in advance. As the chair of a meeting, you can say, 'Great, now we're going to talk about issue b and for reasons 1,2,3, Frances, you can lead this and make sure that the group delivers on the decision. You have 15 minutes.'
It feels weird at first but you know what doesn't feel weird when it's happening? GETTING STUFF DONE EFFECTIVELY.
Keep the guest list to a minimum
I can't think of a use of the word 'bloat' that indicates something positive. Not a single use.
And yet meeting bloat happens so easily: let's get Jane from accounting, Frank from estates and Mo from marketing in on this. Oh yeh, actually, we should probably have someone from PR too. What about Ellie from product – she's good in these situations.
And before you know it, your time cost has just increased exponentially.
A few months ago, Elon Musk under intense pressure to get his targets hit issued a memo on meetings which stated that if you feel someone is wasting your time or a meeting is pointless, you should just get up and leave.
That makes sense in a knowledge economy.
One other cause of the problem of inflating guest lists for meetings is that people want to share the risk of a discussion.
While it's thoroughly understandable that you'd like to share the risk of a decision with a group of people, you must try to avoid what is essentially bureaucratic cowardice.
Own your decisions and be excellent at delivering good outcomes from them.
Don’t focus on things that you can’t change
I like the folk tale of the farmer whose family are raising grain. Each night, they eat together. One night, the son is late to dinner and the father asks him why. He explains that he is late because he's been out in the fields helping the crops to grow. The father feels this is reasonable.
The next morning, when they go out into the fields, all of the wheat is flattened. The father, understandably annoyed at his ruined crop, asks the son what happens. The son replies: "I wanted to help the crop to grow so I pulled all of the stems up by a few inches."
That's life. Deal with it. Accept what you cannot change for what it is.
A great way to avoid stress is to ignore the things that you can't change and to appreciate that change that is meaningful is often incremental and iterative.
Controversial here, but I frequently think of Rosa Luxembourg here. Her approach was 'a long march through the institutions.' I believe in that.
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That's it. Those are my tips for improving meetings in the knowledge economy. It's unlikely that the concept of a meeting is going to disappear. And although it may change, we're always going to need strategies for getting things done.
These are mine. If they help you, great. If they don't, well done on reading this far anyway. You're great.