An Hour Well Spent?
“A meeting is a place where you keep the minutes and throw away the hours.”
– Thomas Kayser
At 9am, 9 people receive an email with instructions to gather in one of the company conference rooms. The group convenes 2 hours later and spends the next 90 minutes providing status updates. Three of the participants do not prepare for this occasion; 3 do not say a word; 3 view it as a complete waste of time. This is a description of a typical meeting in corporate America, and what’s worse: many in the room will grind through a similar routine evvveeeerrry day[i].
A survey of business leaders found that 72% of them spent more time in meetings than they did 5 years ago while 49% expected time in meetings to increase in the future[ii]. Part of this change in how we spend our workdays has been inevitable; however, this is exacerbated by the self-perpetuating tendency of bad meetings to lead to, well… more meetings!
The cost of ineffective meetings extends beyond lost productivity. Increased meeting frequency has been linked to increased workplace fatigue, increased perceived workload, and decreased individual well-being. Your meetings are indeed killing you![iii]
So, what do we need to do to turn bad meetings into good ones, and potentially improve our well-being in the process? Common sense recommendations to turn the bad into the good include: a) define the purpose and desired outcomes, b) only invite those who will contribute, c) pre-circulate an agenda, and d) leave with concrete action items. Even the exercise to eliminate an executive team’s lowest value meetings is likely to offer material gains.
If bad meetings self-perpetuate themselves, and good meetings offer the potential for significant productivity gains, what are the benefits of great meetings? I would argue that great meetings create value through advancing the team’s best ideas while offering the potential for fewer future meetings. The ability to conduct great meetings will require adopting organizing principles and leadership behaviors at four different junctures:
1) Before the Meeting
Organizing principle: Prep time should outweigh actual meeting duration. You can boil a pack of instant ramen in minutes. Consuming it will also leave you bloated and with a stomachache. On the other hand, a great bowl of ramen takes hours to prepare and just a few minutes to consume. Great ramen can be profound with what Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos would call the “clarity of angels singing[1].” Bezos writes that the structured memos that start Amazon’s meetings often take a week or more to write; however, the best memos “are brilliant and thoughtful and set up the meeting for high-quality discussion.[iv]”
Leadership behavior: Align meeting purpose with attendees’ goals. When people see that the purpose of the meeting is to help them achieve their goals rather than acting as an inconvenient interruption, the chances of full engagement are likely to increase.
2) To Start the Meeting
Organizing principle: Humanize the group. The stairway up the corporate pyramid gets extremely narrow as you climb upstairs. This narrowing has the tendency to turn meetings into one-upmanship forums. Activities that disarm individuals of weaponized agendas and remind the group that they are teammates and not adversaries help set the stage for debates won on merit father than on relative leverage.
To this end, Bill Campbell the legendary Silicon Valley coach is said to have urged then-Google chairman Eric Schmidt to begin his Monday staff meetings by asking people what they did over the weekend with the dual objectives of the team getting to know each other on a personal level and to begin the meeting with some humanity.[v] Fun and performance are positively correlated!
Leadership behavior. Establish vulnerability. Behavioral scientists have pointed out that leaders’ self-deprecating acts signal to the group that it is safe to be vulnerable on this team. If it is better to be safe than sorry (the value of being silent is greater than the value of potentially being ‘wrong’), the chances of the best ideas being voiced diminish. Leaders must signal that it is better to be sorry than safe.
In a similar vein, I initially found the safety briefings that kicked off meetings at engineering-focused clients to be a bit odd. It was later explained to me that besides telling you where to run (I mean, walk) in the event of an emergency, safety briefings communicated that the presenter cared about the participants. Since then, I have also come to realize that safety briefings can convey that the leader is willing to look vulnerable by performing a seemingly mundane task. Now every time the most senior leader present does not perform the safety briefing, I view it as a lost opportunity.
In a similar vein, I initially found the safety briefings that kicked off meetings at engineering-focused clients to be a bit odd. It was later explained to me that besides telling you where to run (I mean, walk) in the event of an emergency, safety briefings communicated that the presenter cared about the participants. Since then, I have also come to realize that safety briefings can convey that the leader is willing to look vulnerable by performing a seemingly mundane task. Now every time the most senior leader present does not perform the safety briefing, I view it as a lost opportunity.
3) During the Meeting
Organizing principle: Write down your perspectives before discussion. In his book Thinking Fast and Slow, the Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman explains the principle of decorrelate error which says that crowds are only wise if their observations are independent.[2] If different observations influence each other, like what happens during meeting discussions, systematic bias creeps in, rendering the crowd no wiser than the individual. In order to harness the cognitive diversity of a group and to minimize decorrelate error, Kahneman suggests each participant write down a very brief summary of their perspective prior to delving into discussion.[vi]
Leadership behavior: Speak last. Sequence matters. Kahneman also highlights that the perspectives of those who speak early in the discussion and those who speak assertively have an undue influence on the group. If you want to influence the outcome as the leader, speak first; otherwise, wait until others have offered their opinions. This is in line with Bill Campbell’s view that the leader’s job is only to set the decision rules and to break ties.
4) After the Meeting
Organizing principle: Seek team 360° feedback. While we often solicit feedback on our individual performance, we rarely seek feedback on team effectiveness. Yet team behaviors are just as important as individual behaviors. Seek and internalize this feedback.
Leadership behavior: Drain the swamp. If you have arrived at a truly valuable result, it’s unlikely that you have achieved full consensus. Consensus is the enemy of everything valuable (more on that later). Successful meeting leadership sets clear decision rules and a fair chance for everyone to offer their perspective. While the voicing of dissenting opinions must be encouraged, back-channel politicking that undermines the team’s decisions must be properly sanctioned.
Meetings are an essential element for success in the workplace today. Through striving for great meetings, we can focus the organization on what’s valuable. And you never know, you just might end up with fewer meetings on your calendar.
[1] OK maybe I’m exaggerating
[2] And the errors are uncorrelated
[i] Monge, McSween, Wyer (1989). A Profile of Meetings in Corporate America: Results of the 3M Meeting Effectiveness Study
[ii] Tobia, P. M., & Becker, M. C. (1990). Making the most of meeting time. Training and Development Journal, 44, 34 –38.
[iii] Luong, A., & Rogelberg, S. G. (2005). Meetings and More Meetings: The Relationship Between Meeting
Load and the Daily Well-Being of Employees. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, Vol. 9, No. 1, 58 – 67
[iv] Bezos, Jeff (2018). 2017 Letter to Shareholders, P2
[v] Eagle, Rosenberg, Schmidt (2019). Trillion Dollar Coach, 42-43.
[vi] Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking Fast and Slow, 84-85.