What Meetings Do I Need with Whom?!

If you don’t answer this common leader question properly, as your organization grows in number of customers, employees, vendors and initiatives, you will experience a scalability problem. You will find yourself spending a disproportionate amount of your time in meetings and your frustration will grow as you realize you can’t effectively communicate with everyone. It’s not physically possible.

A meeting is typically defined as “a gathering of people for a particular purpose.” A gathering of your team to review reports is a meeting. One employee in your office complaining about the copier is a meeting. A call with your printer to clarify font size is a meeting. Lunch with a client to discuss their account is a meeting. Hopefully you get the point. If you don’t make some important decisions and take control of your meetings, your meetings will take control of you.

Confession

A leader confessed to me that he found himself in meetings for most of every workday. If he needed to “get anything done,” he had to do it before 8:00 a.m. or during evenings or weekends. He literally had a line at his door in addition to a steady flow of incoming and outgoing calls, and it was his fault. He hadn’t taken the time to establish a way of meeting to empower his team to resolve their issues without his direct involvement. If you can relate, I encourage you to change now. The path you’re on is not healthy for you or your organization.

How Many Meetings Do I Need?

The simple answer is as many as it takes to effectively celebrate, create clarity, assure accountability and harvest knowledge and creativity to solve your most pressing issues. In high accountability teams, issues are considered solved when teammates leave the meeting absolutely clear about who’s doing what within a specified period of time to resolve those issues. Accountability is assured when teammates, in subsequent meetings, confirm they completed those critical tasks.

If your pressing issues are piling up, there are four things you can do:

1. Change your meeting agenda to focus more on identifying and solving issues. The Wholistic Leadership System proposes such a meeting agenda.
2. Meet more often. The Wholistic Leadership System proposes a Meeting Pulse.
3. Meet for a longer period of time. The Wholistic Leadership System proposes durations for each meeting type.
4. Change the people you’re meeting with – we shall say more about this…

If your goal is to reduce the amount of time you’re spending in meetings, you need to do number 1 or 4 (or both).

Who Should I Meet With?

You should strive to meet with the smallest number of people needed to resolve your issues. Each person adds more time and expense to your meeting, so be prudent. It is common to have too many people invited to too many meetings. And too many people having veto power over decisions that don’t directly affect them.

My passionate plea is that you only meet with people who will be directly accountable for the decisions that are made in the meeting. That means they will be held accountable to do those things that are committed to in the meeting that align with the roles and responsibilities for their seat in your Accountability Chart. In very practical terms, if someone is going to leave your meeting without owning Rocks or To Dos, they shouldn’t be in your meeting. The exception would be a meeting with the sole purpose of disseminating or exchanging information but be careful here. If you feel like you have to do a lot of information sharing meetings, you may have some right people, right seat issues. I’ll cover that topic in another blog post.

In addition to accountability being essential, if you aren’t confident someone will contribute valuable knowledge and creativity to your meeting, why include them? When you only meet with people who share your core values and get, want and have the capacity to do what needs to be done, you will celebrate regularly with those who are actually securing the wins, create clarity faster and tap into a bank of knowledge, creativity and passion that will result in faster, better solutions to your most pressing issues.

I urge you! Make some critical decisions now to get better control of your meetings. The best answer is rarely to do more meetings or longer meetings. The best answer is to do focused meetings with the few, right people participating.