I Hate Your Stupid Meeting

I Hate Your Stupid Meeting

Imagine a moment when someone who you vaguely know, maybe a relative you haven't seen for a long time, walks up and knocks on the front door of your home, right around dinnertime, and invites themselves in. Stressful, right? That’s what happens with meetings. They impose themselves on your already busy day, forcing you to participate and almost always going on longer than they should. Most of us don’t think about meetings in that way because we have become used to them. They have simply become part of the day, whether in-person or remote.

But that’s not what they were intended for. They were supposed to be events where people collaborate, or where they learn something new from an expert. But modern meetings appear to have simply been shaped and extruded by passing through a press that dates back to the Industrial Revolution – where adhering to the priorities of machines, not people was the norm. This is why meetings are still considered the greatest waster of time in modern business.

So imagine now, being invited to a social event like a cocktail party, where you are free to arrive and leave whenever suits you. It certainly makes the event more attractive and less threatening, doesn’t it? Could you imagine applying that to a meeting invite? Something along the lines of, “here’s the agenda, join for the parts that work for you and leave when it no longer serves your purpose. Is that even conceivable?

Well, it does work. Ricardo Semler, a Brazilian CEO and author of Maverick, and the Seven Day Weekend, is the kind of guy who puts his money where his mouth is – or maybe the other way around – he puts his mouth where his money is – in his business, and he puts forth that meetings can be dynamic and voluntary affairs. Semler is not a young buck. He’s been at this a while, and like his contemporary, Richard Branson, he is passionate about the welfare of his employees and about devising better ways for people to work.

I have also been a vigorous defender of the concept of people over process, not solely on humanistic grounds, but also on the grounds of sheer practicality. People know naturally how to self-organize and collaborate. They also know how to perform self-directed work without the need for supervision. Most employees take pride in this, and often, the very things that get in the way of doing that great work for the company comes in the form of emails, meetings, and impromptu demands, many of which either come from the manager, or carry the manager’s expectation of immediate attention.

Most managers are good people too, but their presence in an organization is often disproportionate to the company’s overall population, a type of middle-age spread that inevitably appears around the mid-section of rapidly maturing companies. With it comes adherence to further process, such as expecting meetings to fit into hour blocks, starting at the top of the hour and when necessary, connecting back-to-back until every agenda has been thoroughly seen.

But just because that’s how we have always done it this way, doesn’t mean we must continue to do it that way, especially if there are better methods available, including shorter, single item meetings, and having no meetings at all, replacing some of them, at least, with one-on-one conversations.

By-the-hour meetings might have made some sense a few decades back when employees were not as bombarded as they are now by other distractions and priorities. Increasingly, employees today are struggling to balance their time. Managing a series of one-hour meetings no longer fits their dynamic daily existence. ?

If you want to learn more, please check out Episode 11 of The Art of Management, entitled I Hate Your Stupid Meeting, which is, itself, the follow-up to Episode 10, entitled Your Meetings Suck, to listen to another engaging conversation between Jack and Steve Prentice on the topic of everyone’s most infamous calendar filler. You’ll find it as part of The Art Of Management Series, available here, or wherever you get your podcasts.