13
Making the Most of Meetings

Why on earth do we spend so much of our work lives in meetings? Truth serum time: how many meetings did you attend today? This week? This month? Probably too many. So, how come we have so many meetings, taking up so much time, with so little progress? Are there any workarounds for improving your odds of gaining value from meetings? What can you do to work around meeting ineffectiveness and claw back some of your valuable time?

Here’s a meeting assessment tool that you should apply to the meetings you have attended this week. If you were the meeting organizer, you can send this practical tool to your attendees. Ask the attendees to consider two large questions in answering each of the five items: (1) clarity of purpose, outcome, and actions for each area, and (2) perceived value relative to time spent.

Rate each of the five items that follow on a scale of 1 to 5.

1 means no value whatsoever—should have done something else

2 means some value but not really worth the time

3 means nothing special, nothing awful

4 means one of the better uses of my time

5 means absolutely valuable—one of the best things I could have done with my time

1. Meeting purpose. How clearly defined was the meeting purpose? How important was it from your perspective?

2. Information sharing. How valuable was the information to you in performing your job?

3. Issue identification and problem solving. How clearly defined were the problems or issues being addressed? How significant were those problems or issues from your perspective?

4. Decision making. Were important decisions made along with clearly defined responsibilities for carrying them out?

5. Work planning and next actions. Did the meeting end with clearly defined work plans, next actions, and due dates? How valuable were those outcomes compared with the time spent to get there?

Add up your total points, and multiply that number by 4. That result puts you in a context against 100 as a “perfect” score. Now think about your total score relative to earning letter grades in school. If you arrived at a total score of 60 (e.g., 5 items each with a rating of 3, multiplied by 4), then you have a more definite sense of how futile many meetings just may be. If you scored as high as 70, you’re nevertheless stuck in C-level work. Getting to 80 would indicate just above B. If you got to 90 or higher, perhaps you should patent your meeting process!

If you’re like most people, most of your meetings will fall well below 80.

That brings us to the 80/20 rule, sometimes referred to as the Pareto principle. A simplified definition is that roughly 80 percent of the effects come from 20 percent of the causes. Sales organizations often point to 80 percent of their sales coming from 20 percent of their customers. A process engineer once told me that 80 percent of the value obtained from a process typically comes from the first 20 percent of that process.

Could it be that 80 percent of your meeting value comes from just 20 percent of your meetings? Even more startling to contemplate, could 80 percent of any particular meeting’s value come from just 20 percent of the meeting? It’s certainly been true in my experience.

THE UPDATE DILEMMA

Often, meetings devolve into updates, in the form of either a senior manager updating those present or team members updating the leader. While updates are important, we all know those deadly round-robin meetings in which everyone gets a chance to update everyone else, boring one another to tears with endless PowerPoint presentations.

To be fair, there are some circumstances under which updates and announcements are best delivered in a meeting format, but very few. Meetings can be appropriate when there is something dramatic to report, someone to acknowledge for an outstanding contribution, or an event in which surprise is part of the purpose.

There is a time and place for each of those assemblages, but plain old updates seem to suck the air out of the room as people sit there getting even further behind while work stacks up back at their desktops. Given the growing mounds of work that most of us face, it’s no wonder people pop open laptops during meetings or run their thumbs raw keeping up with their BlackBerries.

Here’s an example of someone who found a great solution to the need for meaningful updates, along with a great workaround to meeting mania. As you will see, the result benefited not just the group involved but a much wider base of employees in the organization as well.

Jim, a newly hired manager for a global provider of security and data-management services, had taken over a promising yet struggling division of the organization that provided solutions and support to 10,000 field staff. He had 34 direct reports spread around the globe. Keeping tabs on what everyone was doing, what progress people were making, and what issues they were encountering was the equivalent of a full-time job.

Staff meetings were a challenge, to say the least, with conflicts among time zones, travel schedules, customer meetings, and a host of other “normal” events preventing anything from being scheduled in a smooth and easy manner. When people did get together, meetings tended to follow the usual information update drill: some updates were useful to some attendees, but virtually nothing was important to all.

Jim’s brainchild bears on many of the workaround challenges we are exploring across this book. He introduced a fresh approach to updates by requiring that each solution and product manager create a single-page summary of his or her accomplishments in the week just ended along with what the manager hoped to accomplish in the coming week. The department had four strategic performance objectives, and those four objectives served as the basic organizing construct for the weekly update—each objective had a line or two focused on the week gone by and a line or two dedicated to the coming week.

People quickly got with the program, generating these simple reports on a consistent basis. Several benefits began to surface. First of all, people avoided those long, drawn-out meeting updates! Second, by centering on the four strategic objectives, the reports served to reinforce what mattered most to the group. The reports also required all contributors to dedicate a few moments each week to reviewing their work from the higher perspective of intention and accountability (accomplishments and requirements) rather than the more familiar “busy-ness”—what I accomplished versus what I did.

Early on, people were encouraged to circulate their one-page updates to those in the company who would be impacted by the progress made. This initiative proved so valuable to those on the receiving end that the managers then took the added step of posting their updates to a central database so that anyone could track progress on critical projects and strategic objectives.

Today those updates are posted in a blog format so that anyone can easily surf posts chronologically as well as by project, objective, and business area. If Jim needed any additional validation about the value being created by this new and improved weekly update, it came when one of his reports was on vacation and did not post an update. Jim got several e-mail messages from people elsewhere in the company asking what happened—they had become reliant on those updates for their own planning purposes!

Not only had Jim produced a super workaround for meeting mania, but he also elicited indirect workarounds for potential performance gaps within his division. Using the succinct updates, he could identify hot spots as warning signs showed up and suggest responses, rather than waiting for them to blow up, and he could also spot areas where more coaching or training would be needed. Not bad for a simple weekly review!

CREATING VALUABLE MEETINGS

Back in 1986, Andrew Grove, the legendary founder and chairman of Intel, wrote a classic book, High Output Management. In the fourth chapter, “Meetings—the Medium of Management Work,” he offered advice on how to get more out of meetings. He opened the chapter by writing:

Meetings have a bad name. One school of management thought considers them the curse of the manager’s existence. But there is another way to regard meetings. . . a meeting is nothing less than the medium through which managerial work is performed. That means we should not be fighting their very existence, but rather use the time spent in them as efficiently as possible.

Now, there’s a thought: use your time in meetings efficiently and get your work done. What would efficient use of meeting time look like?

Grove proposed two types of meetings, and Intel moved straight down this path for years. The “process meeting” was a regularly scheduled event that managers were required to hold with their direct reports, and it came in three flavors: the one-onone, the staff meeting, and the operations review. The “mission meeting” was usually held ad hoc and was designed to produce a specific output, frequently a decision.

It’s been 25 years since this advice came out, and much of it still holds today. To bring the advice even more up to date, it may be helpful to amend Grove’s breakdown of the two meeting types. Staff meetings and operations reviews have a tendency to revert to flaccid updates, with each participant straining to appear relevant. If we leave updates to another form or forum, we may then arrive at two basic meeting types, each with different purposes and outcomes. Both are versions of Grove’s mission meeting:

1. The issue identification and resolution meeting

a. What’s in the way?

b. Why does it matter (impact, risk, etc.)?

c. What’s it costing us?

d. How could we move forward?

e. What help is needed?

2. The decision-making meeting

a. What kind of decision needs to be made?

b. Who will be impacted by it?

c. Who has what kind of decision rights for this particular issue?

• Who has the right to be consulted prior to the decision?

• Who has the right to be informed after the decision is made?

• Who has the right to make the final decision?

The issue resolution meeting utilizes those present to help identify barriers and solutions. When calling this type of meeting, the meeting organizer should identify the issues to be addressed in the meeting invitation and specify the kind of help needed to move the issue forward.

If you get invited to an issue resolution meeting without a clear purpose or agenda, it is fair game to ask what the organizer hopes to gain by your presence. That way, you can beg off when you have nothing of significance to contribute. Likewise, if there is an important role for you or contribution you can make, then you can better prepare for the meeting and the value expected.

Similarly, when it comes to decision meetings, the organizer should consider what input he or she needs, from whom, and why. Some people in the organization should be consulted before a decision is made because of their experience and expertise or because of the potential impact on their areas of responsibility. If you need to do some consultation before making a decision, consider whether a group meeting is the best forum or if you would be better served with one-to-one meetings.

These two meeting types become workarounds that work by reducing the number of meetings people must attend as well as the number of people who need to meet. By clarifying the difference between idea generation and actual decision making, you can avoid having the wrong people in a meeting, you can shorten the amount of time each meeting requires, and you can even eliminate some meetings altogether.

General Guidelines for Effective Meetings

When planning a meeting, there are a few guidelines that can help you deliver something people will consider a good use of their time. As always, start with purpose and intention. Why are people meeting? What outcome are you intending to produce? What role or contribution do you expect from those attending? Make certain you communicate purpose, outcome, and contribution to those you invite.

Common purposes for which meeting in person or by teleconference may make sense include generating ideas concerning a specific issue or opportunity, identifying roadblocks or risks associated with key goals or projects, brainstorming solutions to those roadblocks or risks, and contributing to a decision process.

Agendas that spell out the purpose and outcome you are targeting will help people prepare, but only if sent early enough to allow time for preparation. Include a specific statement about your intended outcome for each agenda item. The agenda should also include any supporting materials necessary (briefing documents, background material, data, etc.). If the only purpose of the meeting is general updates, then consider other alternatives such as e-mail or database postings.

One of the symptoms of meeting madness is the lack of clarity around purpose. Some people may attend thinking they are supposed to be pushing toward a decision, while others may be slowing things down because they think the purpose is to examine options, uncover risk, and otherwise analyze the situation. Picture a meeting in which two fairly senior folks are singing from different song sheets: one is driving hard for a decision, while the other is constantly offering up new ideas. Neither can understand what possesses the other. Think there might be some potential for a few sparks to fly?

Here are some ideas and tips that should help you through every step of the meeting, from before it starts to after it’s finished:

Before the Meeting

1. If it’s your meeting, provide sufficient briefing materials so that participants can arrive prepared. Let the participants know that you expect them to arrive prepared.

2. When invited to a meeting, ask for details on the purpose, the intended outcome, and the role you are expected to play if these matters are not clear in the invitation. Be sure you know what value the meeting organizer would like to gain from your participation.

3. If you are being invited only to provide an update on something, ask if an e-mail or some other briefing document would suffice.

It’s important to make sure that only the right people for the meeting show up to it. The decision maker doesn’t need to sit through the brainstorming session that creates the decision options. However, if you’re actually trying to decide something or solve a particular problem, you better make certain the decision authority is in the room!

If you are simply consulting with people, soliciting input and points of view, restrict attendance to those who should have input either by dint of their experience or because their role allows them the right to provide input. If, on the other hand, you are making an actual decision, invite only those whose input you need to validate or implement the decision.

During the Meeting

1. If you are attending a meeting, and the purpose, outcome, and expected contributions have not been made clear, ask the meeting organizer if you can take five minutes to clarify before diving into the agenda.

2. If you are attending or organizing a meeting, whether in person, by conference call, or by videoconference, be sure to do the following:

a. Introduce or clarify who is attending and their roles.

b. Establish ground rules for acceptable behavior: for example, no processing e-mail, no use of BlackBerries, no outside calls, iPhones off.

c. Be mindful of particular room noises, casual jokes, or details of visual presentations that may not be obvious to those attending remotely.

d. Regularly ask for input from remote attendees; consider asking remote participants to lead one or more agenda items, or to kick off brainstorming or idea-generation sessions, so they feel included and not overwhelmed by those in the main conference room.

3. Arrive briefed and ready to contribute in the role or roles for which you have been asked to participate.

4. Always ask for specific action steps following each agenda item, and clarify who has responsibility for them and when you or the team should expect completion of each step.

After the Meeting

1. Conclude each meeting with a short (less than five-minute) evaluation process on the meeting’s value:

a. Meeting purpose

b. Information sharing

c. Issue identification and problem solving

d. Decision making

e. Work planning and next actions

OBSTACLES TO MEETING EFFICIENCY

In certain meetings, you may need all of the team present in order to validate a decision and/or to receive new marching orders, especially if the decision is likely to generate new action plans. The larger the group attending any one meeting, the more likely you are to encounter people embodying two common roadblocks: lack of preparation and being disengaged. Both can be dealt with.

Work Around the Unprepared Participant

One of my clients in the aerospace industry complained that update meetings would often devolve into oral briefings for those attending, rather than digging into the more substantive issues they were facing and how to resolve them quickly. Frequently, meetings needed to be rescheduled once everyone was on the same page because those who had been briefed then needed time to digest the information. This need to meet and meet again was producing enormous schedule delays, and at the tune of $1 million a day, delays had a way of being significant.

From experience, the program manager knew that these kinds of repetitive meetings were commonplace in the industry, and he thought up a solution that required a bit of chutzpah. He sent out a briefing document for his first substantive schedule-review meeting accompanied by a note stating that there would be a short quiz on the briefing document before the formal meeting began. The note explained that those passing the quiz would be entitled to full participation rights in the meeting; those failing the quiz would be relegated to observer status only—they would not be allowed to speak! Like I said, chutzpah! Risky too, you might think. After all, these are rocket scientists!

The first meeting produced 100 percent success in terms of all participants passing the quiz. From then on, the quiz became a meeting standard. People loved the “pressure,” teased one another about being ready, and enjoyed the slightly competitive nature of being tested. The net result was that they cut meeting times substantially while reducing the total number of meetings required by half. Not only did arriving prepared, knowledgeable, and ready to go reduce meeting time, but also the group reduced the time to complete the mission from a budget of 54 months to 27 months.

Obviously, not all of the success in reducing the schedule can be attributed to a quiz, but the quiz did get people on the same page, more efficiently involved, and actively looking for other available workarounds. My guess is that everyone has suffered through meetings with the unprepared participant. What would happen if you shared this novel idea with your team members? With your boss?

Work Around the Disengaged Participant

How many meetings have you attended in which participants were more disengaged than engaged? You see people with laptops open, processing e-mail or working on project deliverables, not to mention the furious thumbing of the CrackBerry addicted, or those who pop out for those oh-so-important calls. Why do people even bother to turn up if they’re not really there to participate?

The answers to that rhetorical question could lie in politics and culture as easily as in the fear that something important might actually surface. My general observations over the years would suggest that very few people find meetings valuable, and so e-mail, BlackBerries, and iPhones give them the opportunity to at least get something done.

If your meetings are populated by players who are disengaged, take heart. Here are a few suggestions that have proved effective:

1. Start with your intended purpose and outcomes; solicit agreement that these are worth pursuing, and confirm that those attending have reason to participate. If someone begs off due to lack of interest or business context, allow him or her to leave, and then make certain that for future meetings the right people are invited.

2. Establish a ground rule that laptops and wireless devices are to remain closed except for reference or note taking.

3. Clarify participation guidelines—no cell phones or outside calls. Ask if anyone has any fires or crises looming or conflicting calls or meetings, and plan accordingly.

4. Assign response-ability, in advance, for each agenda item to different participants.

5. If you still have distracted or disengaged attendees, consider calling a break and taking the individual aside to find out if something is distracting him or her—there could be a valid reason! If someone is just not that interested, you can always invite the person to leave and get on with whatever it is that is more important. After the meeting, you can circle back and ask if the individual still needs to be on the meeting invite list. Be careful here—this workaround requires well-chosen words and a light touch!

MEETING ALTERNATIVES

If you are swamped with meetings, here are a few options that may work for you.

Use Video- or Teleconferencing

Technology can streamline the meeting process when effectively applied, or it can become just another time waster. That’s why it’s important that you don’t just employ technology arbitrarily.

• On the upside, video- or teleconferencing can be an effective workaround for meetings of marginal value and certainly can minimize other disruptions such as long-distance travel or even just the time it takes to cross from one building to the next.

• On the downside, many people have learned that they can utilize the teleconference facility to functionally avoid the meeting while still being nominally present.

• Be wary of “participants” who use meetings to multitask— doing e-mail, stepping out for other calls, or performing other kinds of work while the meeting is in process. If you need someone to be in the room, make certain the person is actually “in the room,” not lost in e-mail land or in transit between other tasks.

• If you are required to attend meetings with little or no apparent value, the teleconference could be a built-in workaround that enables you to get more work done by avoiding having to convene in the conference room.

In 90 percent of the meetings I see in larger organizations, a goodly number of people attend by telephone, primarily due to the geographic spread of key players. Well-intentioned and theoretically useful applications of teleconferencing can still waste time and talent by not employing effective meeting protocols.

Rules for Effective Teleconferencing

• Make sure everybody knows who is on the phone, introducing everybody and polling locations for participants.

• Be considerate of those phoning in. Often, the host team is in a single conference room, and the conversation tends to become dominated by those in the room. Simple and obvious things can kill the meeting for those phoning in, such as insider jokes and people talking over one another. It’s easy to figure out what’s going on if you are in the room, but it can be hard if you’re on the phone. If you aren’t considerate of those on the phone, you may be encouraging them to multitask. I’ve even witnessed a participant with his phone on mute while holding another, unrelated meeting in person, just because the teleconference was so useless!

• If you’re brainstorming or moving toward a decision, the leader needs to make a conscious effort to poll those attending by telephone, asking pointed questions to engage them and periodically summarizing findings, conclusions, or specific decisions.

Replace Weekly Staff Meetings with Weekly Review Meetings

Instead of conducting the usual round-robin, activity-based updates, with or without PowerPoint detailing the activities and the “I said, they said” blow-by-blows, consider gearing staff meetings to accomplishments and support needed to accomplish even more next week.

The process might include the following key components:

• What I accomplished (milestones, deliverables, projects completed, etc.)

• What I did not do and why (what got in the way—think control and influence)

• Where I need assistance

• Training or resource required

• Leadership air cover to influence another group, team, or department

• Management support in removing barriers or creating new workarounds

• What’s coming next week—major milestones or deliverables

• Any help needed?

• Any danger of slippage?

Replace Weekly Review Meetings with Weekly Review Blogs

Even though weekly review meetings are a big upgrade over traditional staff meetings, they are meetings nonetheless and require people to convene in one form or another. It can pay to explore the idea of replacing the weekly review meeting with weekly-review blog posts to an internal site. This option can be especially attractive if the team is located in multiple geographic areas and time zones. The information is still available, but it is delivered at a considerable savings of both time and logistical juggling.

• Restrict weekly-review blogs to single-page updates.

• What I accomplished in the last seven days

• What I plan to accomplish in the next seven days

• How each accomplishment links to key goals, objectives, and projects

• E-mail the blog or database links to impacted parties until this approach becomes your standard updating procedure.

Update on the Fly

If the occasional update is necessary, why not do the update on the fly? For example, could you walk to the cafeteria with a coworker, your boss, or your direct reports and update while on the way for a cup of coffee? If you need to meet in an office, a slightly twisted idea is to meet while standing—no chairs allowed. As soon as we settle in, we inevitably settle down for that “long winter’s night.”

Meetings suck up time—we all know that. Some are purely pointless, while others may have value. One common denominator is that they consume time and require scheduling gymnastics. If you can accomplish the result by some form of electronic updating (e-mail, database, blog post, etc.), you may achieve the storied winwin: everyone gets the information needed while saving time in the process. If getting together still seems necessary, then do consider various forms of teleconferencing—just be sure to incorporate the protocols that help maintain course and facilitate contributions from those calling in.

WORKAROUND QUESTIONS

Meeting workarounds can be awfully tricky primarily because they involve multiple other people. Those other people could include your boss, other higher-ups, and people from other teams, all against the backdrop of politics in general. When you’re looking for workaround options, here are some questions that may help you determine whether meeting is necessary and, if so, in what format:

1. Are there specific accomplishments, milestones, or deliverables that need to be reviewed?

• Was anything accomplished for which some form of acknowledgment, recognition, or even celebration would be valuable?

• Are there lessons learned that would be valuable to share with the larger team? (Sometimes meetings are the best format if teaching is an outcome; otherwise, lean toward database or blog posts to track lessons.)

2. Are there notable milestones, objectives, or deliverables expected in the next week or two?

• Anything in jeopardy for which creative planning or contribution from team members will be helpful?

• Any areas in which one or more of the team members may need assistance?

3. Do you have a big announcement looming for which in-person meetings may be the best way to deliver the news?

• A big contract awarded?

• Change in strategic direction?

• Introduction of new players?

4. Could the purpose and outcome of the meeting be accomplished in another format or venue?

• Teleconference?

• Weekly review via e-mail, database, or blog-type posting?