Truth 14
One Less Meeting Gets You Home in Time for Dinner

A client of mine absolutely loved to have meetings. Regardless of the topic, if there was some reason for at least two people to have any kind of interaction, a meeting got called. Not only were there a lot of meetings, but there would almost always be superfluous bodies taking up space in the meeting who had no real reason to be there other than to be "informed." Now, if decisions got made and things got done, I would have had more tolerance for the meeting mania. But more often than not, little got done at these meetings other than to schedule more meetings. It was madness!

As a senior manager, I could have spent every working hour of every day in meetings.

As a senior manager, I could have spent every working hour of every day in meetings. Me meeting with other managers or my staff. Vendors wanting to meet with me. Meeting with customers. Meeting with other organizations. Meetings to decide what meetings to have or not have. It was meeting after meeting after meeting. I had to actively control my calendar to say no to meetings that didn't make sense and push back on meetings I didn't need to attend or where we could get work done through other means.

As much as I may grouse about meetings, some of them were necessary, beneficial, and effective. Others were a total waste of time and could have been accomplished by other means. The million-Euro question then becomes, "How do you keep the beneficial meetings and eliminate the wastes of time?" In my experience, there are several situations where meetings are generally more appropriate than other means:

• Getting buy-in or consensus on a strategy, direction, or decision. Meet if you have something that requires people being 100% bought in to the solution. For people to be truly bought in, they need to have an opportunity to influence direction, express concerns, or provide alternatives.
• Team building. If you want your team to work together better, they need meeting time to get to know each other, to understand their relative strengths and weaknesses, and to want to help each other.
• Celebrating a success or milestone. Having an e-party just doesn't work. Let your folks get together for a milkshake and celebrate a successful completion of a project, meeting a critical milestone, or a holiday.
• Delivering bad news where people will likely have questions. No one likes to find out bad news by reading a memo. If you have bad news that will affect people directly, get them in a room if logistically possible and deliver the message. It gives people an opportunity to interact and is a more humane and sensitive way to deliver bad news.

What are some effective alternatives to people getting together in a room to meet? Try these on for size:

• E-mail. Great for disseminating information and for some decision making that may not be contentious or controversial. Just watch for when a topic does turn contentious or controversial; it's best to take the discussion offline and get a meeting together for the relevant parties to discuss.
• Websites. Also great for disseminating information or for getting input.
• Audio/videoconferencing. Effective when logistics prevent people from physically meeting or when a person only wants to listen in on a meeting.
• One-on-one discussions. Effective when a decision or direction can be made by just a couple of people and then others can be informed through e-mail or websites.

We need to interact, we need to exchange information, and we need to work together to get things done. Avoid falling into the meeting trap. Ask yourself if there are other ways to communicate and get your point across.