How to improve your boring meetings

Most leaders don't rock up on a Monday aiming to fill their calendars with meetings so that they can avoid achieving their team's vision. But by Friday it can sure look like mission accomplished.

Meetings are supposed to help people get their work done more effectively but they have a nasty habit of getting in the way of real work. This was bad enough in the non-Zoom world but the ease of adding someone to your meeting has increased the potential for oversharing and inefficiency.

Steven Rogelberg (2019) estimated that costs of unproductive executive meetings in America was $US30 billion annually and identified several reasons meetings “stink” for the Harvard Business Review:

• 73% of people admit to doing other work
• 90% day dream
• The meeting chair is ineffective
• Agendas are irrelevant
• Meetings are too long and lack focus
• Attendees are disengaged 

In my own research on high performing teams, I have observed a number of cultural factors that can make meetings ineffective. Here are a few to consider and combat:

1. An unclear meeting purpose. People are often confused about the purpose of the meeting. Is it to: connect with peers, listen to information, discuss a critical issue, make decisions or follow up on actions? Maybe it’s all of these. But why not define a clear purpose up front?
2. Too much information sharing. Meetings are often over-filled with information sharing and under presented by critical discussion tethered to follow up actions. Why not send the information out before the meeting and structure the meeting to discuss the material in depth and then make decisions? If you are not solving problems or making decisions in a meeting, what are you there for?
3. Social repression. Meeting attendees are holding back what they really think to fit in with the group's perceived culture. As a consequence, very little of the group's collective intellectual power is available for use which is the whole reason to meet. Why not praise people who think differently and send a different message? Queue Steve Jobs: “It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”
4. Interpersonal conflict. People are unhappy in meetings because they have issues with colleagues that remain unresolved and become worried that their view about a topic will be interpreted through the lens of interpersonal conflict. That reduces the intellectual bandwidth of the meeting. Leaders, why not take charge, and tell colleagues that skilled disagreement is helpful?
5. Poor decision making processes. The people meeting make decisions based on the loudest or most feared voice. They don’t have visible ways to represent their thinking or critical thinking tools to evaluate possible outcomes. The result? The least controversial decisions are made rather than the best decisions from the best available thinking. Why not use critical decision making tools to think through all major decisions?

So, what would it look like if meetings were more effective? Here’s eight ideas that you might find helpful.

1. Meet less. Cut out all unnecessary meetings in your calendar that you have control over. Resist the temptation to call unnecessary meetings. Replace them with other forms of communication like conversations and quick check ins. Allow people to do work individually that doesn’t benefit from meeting or collaboration. Yes, one person can change a light bulb or write a report. Not everything benefits from teaming.
2. Meet more efficiently. Reduce your meeting time. Could that one hour meeting be transformed into a more focused half and hour meeting with a laser-like focus?
3. Connect your meeting purpose to the team’s vision. Only meet if the issues relate fundamentally to the achievement of your core vision and its associated tasks.
4. Clarify your meeting intentions. Be very clear about what you what from the meeting. Surely, decisions and actions. Otherwise, why would you meet?
5. Lead the meeting, or teach people to lead the meeting effectively. Ensure agenda items are limited and speaking opportunities are shared equitably.
6. Address the social needs of the group by building in meeting check-ins such as: what’s working working well, what’s challenging, what are you looking forward to and what do you need help with? Check-ins can be valuable because they strengthen social bonds which bolster the group psychological safety required to share genuine feedback. Genuine feedback is the basis of better decision making.
7. Make high quality attention and focus critical. Have a no phones rule if you have to.
8. Prioritise equitable speaking time. Creating a meeting structure where everyone has a similar amount of time to give their opinion on an issue put up for decision making. Google found this to be one of the factors present in a high performing team. (Duhigg, 2016).
9. Prepare – every participant should prepare well for a meeting before the meeting. This will ensure that the meeting is about discussion and decision making and not the learning of the new information.

A leader's job is to influence their team to get work done to a high standard. Leaders can't do this if they are stuck in meetings and unavailable to their teams. One easy way leaders can fix this and increase their impact is to address the way they meet others.

References

Allen, J. A., Rogelberg, S. G., & Scott, J. C. (2008). Mind your meetings: Improve your organization’s effectiveness one meeting at a time. Quality Progress, 41.

Burchard, B. (2017). High performance habits: How extraordinary people become that way. Hay House.

Coyle, D. (2018). The culture code: The secrets of highly successful groups. Bantam.

Clark, T. R. (2020). The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety: Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Duhigg, C. (2016). What Google learned from its quest to build the perfect team. The New York Times Magazine, 26.

McKeown, G. (2014). Essentialism: The disciplined pursuit of less. Crown Business.

Rogelberg, S. (2019). Why Your Meetings Stink—and What to Do About It. https://hbr.org/2019/01/why-your-meetings-stink-and-what-to-do-about-it