Meetings… and How to Fix Them

If you want to get a group of people talking immediately during a training class, all you need to do is ask them one simple question:

“In your experience, what is the trouble with meetings?”

I’ve had some groups engage in such spirited discussion that I had trouble bringing them back to the larger group.?Indeed, if you ask someone what drains them of energy the most at work, it will either come down to meetings, difficult colleagues/bosses, or both.

Much has been said/researched about how to make meetings more effective.?The “management science” movement of the 1950’s and 60’s sought to make it a study in process improvement.?Still others sought to improve meeting content through better agendas.?3M was so interested in the topic that they dedicated a team to research how to run more effective meetings, which culminated in a book (“Mastering Meetings:?Discovering the Hidden Potential of Effective Business Meetings) in 1994.?And who can forget Patrick Lencioni’s seminal work “Death by Meeting” in 2004?

Sadly, people are still complaining about meetings as much as they did before, even more so in the era of?Zoom meetings.?It seems to be a very tough nut to crack.?I realize I am taking a risk attempting to add to this conversation.?But I do think I have something that could help.

The Key Role in Any Meeting

I have had the pleasure of working with a fair amount of really smart people who have worked for private consulting firms (i.e. think of Accenture, Price Waterhouse Cooper, McKinsey, etc.).?They get paid a fair amount of money to do something that most of us don’t do, and if we try to do it… we don’t do it very well.??What is the magic skill that hundreds of firms pay good money for?

Meeting facilitation.

You know this role – it’s the person who is supposed to be running the meeting.?Most of the time meeting facilitation falls to the ranking person at the meeting such as a manager or director.?Whoever gets this role tends to find it a burden: something to be endured vs. an opportunity to lead.?Professional consultants on the other hand are extremely intentional about facilitating meetings, as their primary value is getting to an end product (a decision, a point of view, a best method, etc.).?

I know what you’re thinking – isn’t everyone’s job in running a meeting supposed to get to an end product??It is, but the penalties for those of us on the inside are much less than those who work as consultants.?Consultants can get fired; the rest of us just schedule another meeting to rehash what was supposed to be accomplished in the first meeting.

I have been trained by some of the best facilitators in the business.?I have watched them deal with easy and incredibly challenging situations.?If there were some things you could do to take the pain out of meetings and actually make them useful/productive, isn’t that something you’d be interested in??Here are my top suggestions (stolen from them):

The Art/Practice of Being a Meeting Facilitator

1)?????Create outcomes for your meeting instead of agendas:?Now this statement of course assumes that you go to meetings where the agenda was thoughtfully created ahead of time.?You may be thinking “I’d just love it if I even knew what we were going to talk about.”?While agendas provide much needed structure, a list of outcomes will get you to action.?

Here’s an easy way to think about creating outcomes for your next meeting vs. an agenda that is getting you nowhere:?Take out an agenda from one of your most recent meetings, and try this test:

After each agenda item (“Review quarterly business results”) add the phrase SO THAT and try to finish the sentence.?What we’re shooting for here is for you to create an outcome (i.e. an action step, a decision, a point of view, a project plan, etc.) when you finish the sentence.?

In our example of reviewing quarterly results, if your SO THAT is “So we can revise Q3’s sales forecast”, that’s a good outcome.??If your SO THAT for this agenda item is “So the team can stay informed”, that is not an outcome and should be deleted from the meeting.?If you want to inform someone, send them an email.

Creating a list of outcomes for your meeting implies that you aren’t leaving the room until these work products are created.?What you will find is that your list of outcomes is much shorter than your agenda.?You will also find out (if you send the outcomes to meeting attendees ahead of time) that people will call you to say they are not the right person to attend the meeting if you’re actually going to make a decision.?Imagine that…

2)?????Great facilitators worry more about group process vs. the content of a meeting:?You can often tell when you have a professional consultant in the building – they’re always the ones with a plastic container filled with Post-It notes and sharpie pens.?Why??Because unlike the rest of us, they have thought through how they want to achieve the various outcomes for a meeting beforehand.

Post-It notes level the playing field between leaders and individual contributors.?When you’re brainstorming ideas, you don’t want anyone to know if a certain idea is the CEO’s.?Otherwise people will defer to the ranking leader every time… and rarely do you get a great outcome when this happens.

Post-It notes are just one example of how great facilitators think about how to achieve the outcomes the group desires.?But you can’t be thinking about group process when you’re busy trying to solve the problem (i.e. you’re stuck in the content of the meeting).?I’m not saying this is going to be easy, and there might be times when you need to insert your opinion.?If you limit your participation in the meeting to help the group instead, the meeting will be more successful.

3)?????Great facilitators never do for the group what the group can do for themselves:?Ownership of a meeting must be communal if you want to get anything done.?As facilitators, we send signals to the group in small but powerful ways:

a.?Instead of writing things down on the flip chart or whiteboard, ask the group if someone is willing to be a scribe

b.?If work needs to be broken out into smaller groups, ask the group how much time they will need to complete the task

c.?If you’re doing a brainstorming session, ask people from the group to categorize the ideas into logical groupings and sort duplicates

d.?If you sense the group needs a break, ask them how long they would like the break to be

These simple actions send powerful signals that this is the group’s work, not yours.?You are vested in helping them achieve the outcomes… but it is still their work.

4)?????Great facilitators work very hard to ensure the group is clear on what the actual problem is:?Have you ever sat through a meeting and wondered why you were asked to attend??It’s a common phenomenon in the working world.??A considerable amount of wasted time occurs in meetings because the group is not clear on the problem they’re trying to solve for.

Here’s a simple thing for you to try the next time the group you’re working with gets stuck in a meeting and can’t move forward:?Ask each of them to write down on a Post-It note what they think the problem statement actually is.?You use a small piece of paper so each person is brief.?Ask them not to discuss what they’re writing down with anyone else at the table.?Then have each person read aloud what they think the problem statement is.?

More often than not, if you have 7 people at the meeting (works just fine on Zoom meetings too) you will receive 7 different problem statements.?You can then start co-creating a joint problem statement so you can move forward trying to solve it.

Why This Often Fails

You may be thinking right now “These seem very common sensical.?Isn’t there more to it than just doing these four simple things?”

In a word:?No.

The reason your meetings are still a waste of time is because very few people have the personal discipline to do these facilitative techniques consistently.??They’re not necessarily valued in a world that is used to dull/boring/unproductive meetings.??It’s very much like people who are really good at project management:?When you get to work with someone who is a skilled project manager, it’s an absolute joy – and yet these people are rarely rewarded by the organization unless they’re in IT or operations.

Here's my ask of you:?For the next meeting you have to run, try one of the techniques listed above.?See what happens, how different the meeting feels.?If nothing else try creating outcomes instead of an agenda.?People may not like it because it tends to filter out opportunities for people to pontificate… but that’s kind of the point.

I want to have a reputation for getting things done in meetings… don’t you?