New Episode from The Art of Management Podcast: Your Meetings Suck

Do Your Meetings Suck?

The answer is a pretty-much unqualified “yes.”?Does it need to be that way??Of course not, but it is not easy.?Why do they always suck? Given that in the same amount of time, humans went from not being able to fly at all to being able to visit space stations in reusable rockets, we couldn’t have fixed meetings at the same time?

Instead, meetings have become “events unto themselves,” losing track of their original purpose, and becoming instead a strange hybrid of habit, ritual and power.

But now we have a new opportunity to make them suck much less, and in fact, to make sure the only meetings that are allowed to go ahead are ones that do not suck and which can prove in advance their unique value – offering something that other types of communication cannot do, and putting to rest,?the unspoken complaint that “this could have been an email.”

Ironically, we can turn to childhood playtime, that period where we as children, yet untainted by the rigors of school and work, naturally came together to play and self-organize. In fact, there are many great lessons we can learn about our human ability to cooperate and collaborate, not only from childhood, but also from the centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution, an epoch before machines and their owners shaped time according to their own priorities.

Meetings are also costly, even though that is not always apparent. They are examples of hidden costs. No one stops to consider how much time it takes to attend meetings. Although a meeting has, at its root, a reason to exist, its efficient deployment has been greatly eclipsed by process, ritual, and hierarchy to the point that no one questions, for example, whether a one-hour meeting actually needs its full hour. We just accept it. We have forgotten that there should actually be a tangible and demonstrable return on time invested (ROTI) for every meeting, because that time is not recoverable.

Meetings deserve to evolve, and might actually do this best by devolving. Jack Skeels thinks he has the answer. In addition to taking the reins away from traditional managers, he proposes the elimination of compound meetings (having multiple topics on the agenda), replacing them with much shorter, single purpose gatherings. He suggests that flat (peer-to-peer) meetings be prioritized over hierarchical ones, and that small talk has value as a social lubricant and actually is more time efficient than the traditional sharp start.

He also passes along some advice from Ricardo Semler, a Brazilian CEO and author of Maverick! The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace, and The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works. Semler’s highly democratic and organic approach to meetings involves allowing people to leave when the meeting no longer serves their purpose, and also eliminating meetings entirely, simply by visiting people instead.

These are radical ideas to the North American business zeitgeist, but only because we have collectively slipped into a bad habit, one that costs millions, even billions of hours and dollars every year. But this is the age of Agile. It’s time to make meetings no longer suck, but instead become part of this new century.

Please check out Episode 10 of The Art of Management, 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.