Meetings can be painful
The dreaded “m” word. Sometimes we can feel like Spiderman, swinging from meeting to meeting, and everything else is a blur. We begin to wonder when we are going to get some real work done. And then we realize that the answer to that might be the weekend. Again. So are meetings that important? Maybe if we axed them, our team would get more done? Before we get drastic, let’s dream a little about what meetings could be like.
Meetings are important because they help ensure that you can do your work more efficiently and effectively. For good meetings to happen, however, the organization must be healthy. Some signs of a healthy organization are minimal confusion and politics, and no silos.
More efficient and effective
You may have had to read that last paragraph twice. “Meetings make work more effective and efficient? Wait. I experience the contrary!”
Patrick Lencioni’s Death by Meeting can give us some insight into the fact that the problem may not be meetings themselves, but how we run them. The problem is that we frequently do meetings wrong. They are dull, confusing, and end up being a waste of time. And the temptation is to think about having less of them. But that would be a tragic mistake.
Just think about it for a second. What if your meetings truly did have the power to make your team and your organization more efficient and effective? Would you have meetings then? To get there, we have to talk about organizational health first.
Organizational Health
A healthy organization is one where there is clarity, alignment, and minimal dysfunction. And you get lots of work done. And quickly. For an organization to be healthy, the leadership team needs to be cohesive. This means that there are deep levels of trust such that the team can have constructive conflict around what is going to make the organization better. When we trust each other, when we start duking it out around ideas, we feel like we are all on the same team and not rivals. Without good conflict, meetings are bo-ring!
With trust and conflict, we can commit to the decisions made in meetings. We can then hold each other accountable to those commitments to make sure that we are getting the results we want.
When our organization is healthy, only then can we have good meetings. If people don’t trust each other enough to speak up in meetings and debate passionately (to find the right answer, of course), not everyone will buy in. When I don’t buy in, I don’t commit. And when I don’t commit, there is a lack of alignment. And when there is a lack of alignment, we are not effective, and we are not efficient.
What causes meetings to be so frustrating?
Have you ever been in one of those meetings where you discuss things like the Christmas party, a new idea, strategic priorities, and the presentations some of the team members have put together? And then just when it is time for the thing you wanted to talk about, time runs out. It doesn’t get discussed and gets put on the agenda “for next time”. Frustrating!
The solution to this, once again, is not to remove meetings, but to create different types of meetings, never mixing them.
We can divide meetings up into four types:
Daily Check-in
The best way to do this meeting is standing up at the same time every day. It lasts 5-10 minutes maximum. You can even do it with a cup of coffee at the beginning of the day. The daily check-in is just a moment to see what everyone is up to for the day, and this saves TONS of time because everyone knows what everyone’s day is looking like. If Tim is out visiting a client, he says that, and everybody knows at the start of the day and not wonder why he is not answering your emails.
Weekly Staff Meeting
The weekly staff meeting is a tactical meeting and should last from 45 to 90 minutes. It is tactical because there are already strategic imperatives to act as guides for the discussion. It is vital for there to be no agenda beforehand. Yes, no agenda beforehand! At the beginning of the meeting, there is a lightning round where each one says what they think their 2-3 most important things are for the week.
After the lightning round, the team reviews the strategic priorities and sees how they are doing using a grading system. By discussing the most critical issues that are keeping them from making their strategy a reality, team members can then see what they should actually be doing for the week.
You can see how this meeting makes things so much easier. The team trusts one another to say what they think, so they have healthy conflict around what they believe or feel is most important. Everyone comes out of the meeting, knowing what they and others need to do. If done right, the tactical meeting alone has massive potential for giving an organization a competitive edge over others.
Ad Hoc Strategic
From time-to-time, issues will come up that can affect the company a great deal. For this reason, a strategy meeting is vital. In this type of meeting, you discuss one issue, and one issue only, for a few hours. This focus ensures that the team concentrates on finding the best solution to the problem.
These strategic issues are critical to the organization’s future. There is no way you can dedicate a portion of a general meeting to one or several issues that will likely have tremendous consequences in the long run.
Because the stakes are high, you will hopefully find a passionate debate around these issues. That is an excellent sign! Here, as a leader, it is crucial that you let your team members know that they are doing the right thing because there is a good chance they might feel uncomfortable with the conflict.
Quarterly Off-Site
There can be some fun built into this, but the main focus of this type of meeting is to step back, breathe, and take a look at the big picture, the overall health of the organization, as a team.
Here are some ideas to make this one or two day off-site fruitful:
- Team cohesiveness
- Does everyone feel able to be open and honest with one another?
- Is there good conflict, or are people holding back?
- Does the team really commit to decisions?
- Are we holding each other accountable?
- Are we focusing on the results of the leadership team?
- Clarity
- Does how we treat each other align with our core values?
- Are we focusing on the business that we are in?
- How is our strategy going?
- Is what we are focusing on the most crucial thing?
- Is everybody doing their part?
- Overcommunicate clarity
- Are we as leaders communicating the essential things in the organization constantly and consistently? Is it cascading down effectively?
- Systems and procedures
- How are our human systems doing?
- Are we hiring the right people? How are our best people doing? How are we encouraging those who need help and support?
- Are we motivating and rewarding in line with what we want?
- How are our meetings going?
By following this recipe in a healthy organization, your meetings will begin to transform the way you work, and your people might actually start to enjoy them. I mean that. And you will be glad you didn’t give them the ax.
