Meetings Require Mutual Respect
An old co-worker tweeted the other day about her frustration of going to meetings where everyone breaks out a laptop. Long a pet peeve of mine, I think we as meeting leaders have brought this upon ourselves. In our desire to be inclusive we jumped the corporate shark and are now wasting people’s time.
If we are more judicious about when, why and how we hold meetings we will reset the norms by which we interact in the office.
I am a bit Draconian so take this with a grain of salt. A few thoughts on improving meetings:
- Respect others enough not to waste their time - reconsider even calling the meeting. Will a conversation with a couple people at their desks’ suffice? If you have to walk around and talk to three people so be it. Just be consistent in your discussions. (Side note: Decisions should never be made or thought about for the first time in meetings. Like a board meeting you should have already pre-sold everyone. The meeting is to make it official so everyone can see the other nodding heads.)
- If you have to call a meeting, come prepared. Have an agenda, know what you want out of it, what you expect out of each participant. This will help with your invite list too.
- Share the output of your preparation with everyone when you send out the meeting invite. Hold their feet to the fire so they also come prepared.
- Limit meetings to 15 minutes, 30 max. If everyone is prepared nothing should take longer than that.
- Remove all the chairs, crank the heat, whatever. Make everyone really damn uncomfortable so that Mr. Tangent and Mrs. Non-Sequitur have to suffer greater consequences when they derail the meeting.
- Cut the number of people you are inclined to invite in half - meetings should not have more than six people in them. More than that and some will not contribute. And what is the point of having wallflowers in a meeting? A summary email will suffice for them.
- One strike and you are out. Kick out everyone with a laptop or iPhone - they are too important to be there anyhow and will not contribute a damn thing. A summary email will suffice for them as well.
- Send out a summary. Recap everything in three bullets max.
What about brainstorming? Our “brainstorming” process is broken. Nobody comes prepared and we never get anything of value out of that. I actually think that these rules apply even to these occasions with a caveat on #4 if things are going so well you cannot justify stopping.
I am sure I am missing a few points and that there are exceptions to all of this, but this should cover 80% of our current black holes, er, meetings.
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