All of us have read those typical articles about meetings and how they stink. Most of these articles suggest all kinds of ways we can make meetings better. What bothers me about these articles is that they play it way too “safe.” Come prepared. Keep the agenda succinct, clear, and manageable. Invite the right people. Stay focused. Be on time. So, let’s get a bit “risky” here and lay it all out there …
I can count about a half dozen reasons why meetings are a complete waste of time. A startup cannot waste time in bad meetings.
Big 6 Reasons Why Meetings Suck
1 - Meeting is used in place of broadcasting.
Many meetings are called just to broadcast information. It’s easy to identify these meetings. Bad news is rarely ever shared through meetings. If bad news is ever mentioned, it’s usually to make the meeting come across overall as credible. A lot of self congratulatory love fests are veiled smartly as meetings. You’ve been in a lot of these meetings before. Admit it.
2 - Meeting lacks authority figure.
Five people are in a meeting talking about a great new idea. These meetings are actually pretty valuable when it’s within a small team, department, or even group. But, everything falls apart when cross-functional meetings are held without key decision makers and authority figures in the room. Why? Because when the meeting ends, everyone continues doing what they were doing before the meeting.
3 - Meeting is not important enough.
If meeting participants all enter the room with laptops, you’ve either invited the wrong people OR your meeting is not as important as you think. Cancel the meeting or politely let those individuals who “need” to be glued to email know that it’s really ok to leave. There is NO single email that is so critical that a person needs to be glued to a Blackberry or laptop if it's an important meeting. If there is a true emergency or critical message, they will receive a phone call or someone will come get them. There are exceptions such as long meetings. But, if that’s the case, I’d insert an email and phone break time here and there so people can keep connected.
4 - Meeting concludes with no action.
A meeting is not a book or a movie. Meetings should not have a beginning, climax, and the ending. If you go into a meeting and your workload does not increase or get reprioritized, it was a complete waste of time. When the meeting concludes, the work must begin. If the meeting concludes but the work continues as usual, it’s probably a wasteful meeting. Also, if the meeting never concludes but creates another meeting, it’s probably a wasteful meeting. Meetings must end, work must begin.
5 - Meeting itself is used to send a message.
This is the “I can spit or piss farther than you” meeting. Or, it’s the “sit back and observe how smart I am” meeting. The dumbest person in the room usually calls the meeting and holds the floor – mainly because the smartest people didn’t have time to prepare because there never was a clear agenda for the meeting. Everyone just politely nods up and down then the meeting ends abruptly.
6 - Meeting is used to give false sense of empowerment and involvement.
Bob goes to every key power broker within the company one by one to win support for his pet project. Bob goes to Jerry and tells him that “Tom loves the idea.” Bob goes to Tom and says “Rick loves the idea.” Bob goes to Rick and (you guessed it) says “Jerry and Tom back the idea 100 percent!!!” Then, Bob calls a meeting with other stakeholders within the company to give them a false sense of empowerment and involvement … in a decision that has already been made.
A good way to think about meetings is to think of how we manage our affairs at home. The truth is … we don’t hold a lot of meetings at home.
If you look at a family of four or five, they rarely hold meetings. Or, should we consider dinner time conversations as equivalents of meetings?
Hmmm. Either way, divorce rates have been going through the roof …
Maybe the best thing to do is to hold a lot of tiny meetings and avoid the big time sink meetings? Stay tuned. I'll put together a meeting so we can explore that a bit more!
- John
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