A Modest Proposal on Meetings Management

#meetings #collaboration #unbossed #learningorganization #workhumor

Recently, a study was published highlighting that the typical large company wastes over $100MM in unnecessary meetings.? Shocking, yes. Surprising? Probably not.? Moreover, our common lived experience during the COVID pandemic and the sustained aftermath is seemingly counted off by longer, commute-free workdays filled with clunky virtual / hybrid meetings. The deleterious impact of our evolved meeting reality is not only monetary, but it is also cultural and psychological.?

In response to this “meeting fatigue”, many companies drive well-meaning umbrella programs to inflect meeting quantity and quality, to wit, meeting-free periods, time-limited default settings in calendaring apps, and detailed guidance on requirements around meeting agendas and attendance limits.? Often the onus of enforcing a corporate hyper-meeting remediation effort falls to individual associates, often pitting them against their leaders.? To be fair, at the enterprise level, many of the tools which can address meeting efficiency are blunt instruments. For instance, the first tool a corporate center pulls out is often the benevolent hammer of “meeting-free Fridays.”? Am I right?

However, if companies dig deeper into the lesser accessed corners of their toolbox they will no doubt find a number of more effective though more sophisticated implements. I’d like to offer up one tool as a leader I have tried out with some success: the voluntary meeting attendance policy. ? A bold proposition, yes.? Perhaps even subversive.? But hear me out.??

How does this idea work?? This approach has a few pieces to it, making it more complex than it appears on the surface.? I will emphasize the tool requires all of the pieces to be used, just declaring the policy is not enough.?

The first part is the most obvious: as the leader, I let the attendees of my meetings know that although I am the senior leader who generally calls (and owns) the meetings in scope of this novel policy, I don't expect them to attend said meetings if they have an “unavoidable” conflict.??

I chose the word “unavoidable” with malice aforethought.? Avoidability in the context of time utilization is really a greyscale, not a black and white, regime.? Upon reflection, we can see that most commitments are moveable with enough effort.? “Unavoidability” is often a concept used by an associate to explain their thoughtful decisions to productively prioritize their time.? I expect that in a world filled with busy employees, meeting attendees subject to my bold proposition will essentially "vote with their feet," avoiding the low-value meetings rather than re-negotiating commitments to higher value priorities.?

And that is what happened when I tried it out! In my experience with this approach, I observed that the dreaded "staff meetings" seemed to have the least consistent attendance.? What a shocker.?

So, enter the next element of this tool: asking respectful questions.? It might go like this: “Pat, I noticed you are not attending this meeting.? Why not?” Pat responds with the unavoidable priority, which I with as much humility as I can muster, I embrace at face value. ? “Geez Pat, since we are now on this topic, tell me how you feel about these meetings? What works?? What value are you getting out of it?? What would you like to get out of it but are not?”? Everyone does this their own way, but I recommend that you approach these interactions with empathy and respect, ask open-ended questions, and brace for impact.? You will hear stuff that might sound like a critique, you need to accept it with gratitude even if you don't feel thankful at the time. I started doing this individually using one-on-ones with the meeting attendees (or non-attendees, as it were).? Then I posed the questions to the group at one of these meetings (or, rather, the willing subset who actually showed up.) I seeded the discussion with insights gleaned from the one-on-one's.??

The third part of the approach is then summarizing and gaining alignment from the community of meeting attendees around what is and what is not working, and why.? In Operational Excellence parlance, we might call this output a root cause analysis.?

Ultimately and inexorably, this led to the final piece, which is making the needed adjustments.? For this example, we agreed as a team to change up the format of this series of staff meetings, and convert them into?a combination of shorter weekly "stand-ups" and longer monthly sessions with prepared agendas and pre-work.? We also adjusted the attendee base for these meetings.? We made other changes as well, including agreeing to favor in-person (though not requiring it) for the monthly meetings.? What we did is decidedly not groundbreaking nor is it insightful.? It’s also not really the point I wish to make.?

The important insight for me was not WHAT worked, but WHY it worked.? Fundamentally, I like to think that this approach shows respect for each associate by trusting each of them to prioritize their work and put the less valuable use of their time, even if it is their boss' meeting, below the more valuable. As I do carry the sin of ego with me like a millstone around my neck, it does warm the cockles of my heart for people to come to my meetings. But my better self realizes that what the company really wants them to do is focus on generating the greatest impact relative to our strategic priorities.? This approach to meetings reinforces the value of these strategic priorities in the mind of each associate, which is by the way an important role of any enterprise leader. Sometimes my very own meetings aren’t the enterprise priority, and I need people to actually tell me that so as to free me from the illusion of my own self-importance.

Secondly, this approach forces the low value of a meeting to become visible, a key requirement for any collaborative problem-solving approach.? Making the problem visible to all involved allows a team to subject it to root cause analysis (think the “Five Whys”).? It also staves off the temptation to frame the people, with their valiant attendance or villainous absence from my substandard meetings, as the problem to solve.? As well, the real problem to solve, thankfully, is also not the person owning the meeting. Seeing people as problems is generally a no-no in a learning organization.??

Finally, as the team jointly developed the solutions after agreeing to the root cause, they committed to seeing the solution through.? Importantly they committed to attend and participate. In my observation they have consistently met this commitment even though, shockingly, net time spent in the target meeting regime actually did not fall.? This, of course, makes me wonder what happened to all of those other “unavoidable” commitments.? I wondered for a super long time until I realized the greyscale nature of “unavoidable” described earlier in this article.?

Might my fragile ego have been hurt because people didn't show up to my meeting at the outset? Hell yeah!? I can tell you that the stinging rebuke to my meeting leadership prowess is a shameful experience I wish to avoid in the future.? But my feelings as a leader are sadly not as important as the well-being and performance of our team. ? And, besides, I feel better now, thank you for asking!?

In the end, this approach hopefully sent the strong message of the importance of mutual respect, collaborative problem solving, and ownership to the team. ? I have found that as a result of our joint effort, my team takes a much greater stake in ensuring that we are having the right meetings, and that they are productive.? Implicitly, this is another way of saying that the sole ownership of meetings is blessedly no longer on my shoulders.? Which is good, because I needed that energy at least in the short-term to recover my shattered ego.?

I have wondered about the applicability of this approach.? Does it still provide net positive outcomes when all meetings are scoped in?? I am not sure.? Maybe.? I have tried pushing the boundaries.? For instance, whether my team knows it or not, I also apply this to regular one-on-one's.? My team is free to move these meetings, or cancel them provided we agree there is no pressing content.? It is disruptive to my calendar, but again, it gives me valuable feedback on the performance of these meetings and their value in the minds of my team.? I have not explicitly tried it on more ad hoc style meetings that I might call, but then again, I recognize someone might assume my attendance-optional approach extends to everything, especially if I nefariously decide not to pro-actively clarify the scope of the process.? In any case, I usually try hard to ensure there is a valid justification for these meetings and pre-alignment whenever I can.??

I've shared this voluntary meeting approach with other leaders and got some interesting looks and comments, such as “Whoa… really?? If I did that, no one would show up!”? To which I can only think to myself, “Thank goodness I did not elaborate on the scarring emotional and psychological impact of my self-inflicted meeting reform journey.”

I am not sure how effective this subversive idea would be at an enterprise level.? But it feels like a tool that leaders on an individual basis might try out.? I would emphasize that the magic of the tool is not so much the policy itself, but the problem-solving approach that follows– you need to use the entire tool! ? If it can mitigate even a fraction of the $100MM cost of worthless meetings and strengthen employee engagement, why not give it a shot?