Bored in meetings?

I just had an amazing experience couple of weeks back which brought a few things in perspective and hence forced me to introspect on what is wrong with the way we conduct our meeting.

I had a 60 minutes important meeting that I had to attend which was very critical for a big client. I also had a flight to catch for which my travel time to airport was around 90 minutes. That left me about 20 minutes short if I attended the whole meeting and at a huge risk of missing the plane.

The chairman of the call wished everybody for Friday, cracked a joke on the cold weather and just while others were starting to talk some more about the weather he called out that we have too many people on the call and we need to be respectful of their time. He had a preset agenda and list of expectations from each group on the agenda. He walked through the agenda so efficiently and effectively that call was over in 25 minutes. I have not been part of a better call. I now had ample time for the flight and had no reason to panic.

However very few meetings leave us with such experience. The meetings recently are getting longer every day and lesser decisions are being taken in these meetings. Ever wondered why?

In the past 15 years of my professional career and sitting through number of these boring meetings I have shortlisted some key reasons for the degeneration in the quality of meetings. And I am not saying the world is at fault here and I am the Victim. I am very much the part of the problem and so are you.

Some very distinct features of what happens in the meetings that drives down the effectiveness of meetings

The culture of number of contribution:

• For the longest time the number of interjections or in simple terms how many times you spoke during a meeting has become the measure of involvement in the meeting. We have unconsciously built that culture and it is getting very difficult to get out of it. More emphasis is bring laid on the number of contributions than the Value of contributions which leads people into talking when really there is nothing that they are adding to the discussion.
• Sir Humphrey Applebey syndrome: This is one out of the bureaucrats book where when you have nothing to say or cannot give a straight answer you keep blabbering about the topic without adding any value. Trust me you are fooling no one. People realize what you are doing and have stopped listening. I particularly remember a funny statement which could have been expressed in three simple words but went on for 3 whole minutes.

"I wonder if I might crave your momentary indulgence in order to discharge a by no means disagreeable obligation which has, over the years, become more or less established practice in government service as we approach the terminal period of the year — calendar, of course, not financial — in fact, not to put too fine a point on it, Week Fifty-One — and submit to you, with all appropriate deference, for your consideration at a convenient juncture, a sincere and sanguine expectation — indeed confidence — indeed one might go so far as to say hope — that the aforementioned period may be, at the end of the day, when all relevant factors have been taken into consideration, susceptible to being deemed to be such as to merit a final verdict of having been by no means unsatisfactory in its overall outcome and, in the final analysis, to give grounds for being judged, on mature reflection, to have been conducive to generating a degree of gratification which will be seen in retrospect to have been significantly higher than the general average

Jim Hacker:  Are you trying to say "Happy Christmas," Humphrey?

Sir Humphrey:  Yes, Minister."

• Focusing on outliers : We waste an awful lot of time in our meetings discussing outliers. No decision would ever be taken if we do not disregard the outliers and yet most of the logical decisions are debated based on these outliers however improbable they may be. Again this comes from not setting the context properly at the start. But these kind of behavior has roots going back to my first and second point the culture of number of contributions or the Sir Humphrey Applebeys syndrome where you just want to talk about it and get away without taking a decision.

Socializing:

• This one is very peculiar. On a day when you have too much work you will hate it but on a day when you are having a relatively lesser backlog you want to be a little casual and engaging. What we forget is that some of the other members in the meeting may not have that luxury and while the initial socializing is fine there is a limit to how much of that you can do on a call with multiple members.

A good meeting is when you can give 10% of the time of the call back to the attending as we are all jumping from one meeting to another.

There will be many more reasons why you have trouble focusing in meetings and trust me you will be guilty of all the above yourself without you realizing it and that is because of the culture that we all have contributed to.

So how do we make our meetings more effective and less boring.

• Appreciate people only when they make a point that has really added value to the conversation.
• Remind people when they start talking about a topic without getting to the point.
• Build a culture of appreciating people who listen intently. You need these people who may have not contributed but at the end of the meeting are more wiser than the ones that spoke a lot.
• At the start of the meeting do two important things remind everyone that every body's time is precious and our goal should be to give 10% of the meeting time back to every one
• On any proposal or idea that is being discussed if you think of a scenario that happens less than 10% of the time then do not raise it because we are focusing on 90% of problem and solving it.

Meetings are a place where you take decisions and go out and implement. Do not make it a place where you sleep with your eyes open.

#ashquotes