Consigliera College: Make Meetings Better
Five questions to ask yourself before you schedule a meeting
I don’t like meetings.
I really don’t like meetings where a group of people get together with a vague aim to discuss something.
A meeting without a clear reason for being, that drags on as people pontificate or come back to their pet issue or complaint; one that starts late and runs over – this is my idea of work hell.
In defense of myself and other like-minded people, I find myself frequently advising clients how to make meetings less hellish.
First, you should understand the culture of your team or workplace around meetings. Some organizations use meetings as relational glue. Do meetings start with lots of chit chat or catching up? Are there enjoyable segues about the best place to get sushi or the performance of kids’ soccer teams? If everyone enjoys that and it is part of the culture, you’re more relationship oriented about meetings.
If meetings are meant to be productive and are less relationship focused, if there’s limited personal chat and more of a focus on the work to be done, your culture is more task oriented.
Task vs relationship is an orientation for both people and organizations. It’s like handedness – you naturally gravitate towards one orientation, which becomes dominant, but you can also use your other hand. I write with my right hand, but type completely ambidextrously. Knowing your natural tendency and that of your organization or team is helpful because you can keep what is dominant and still make meetings more effective.
Here are five questions to ask before you schedule a meeting. And, if you can, five questions everyone in your organization should ask before scheduling a meeting.
What is the problem we are trying to solve or what are we trying to accomplish with a meeting?
This needs to be specific. “Review the new project management process with the leadership team” is not specific, nor is anything that involves “running up the flagpole” or “socializing.”
Try: “Review revenue projections for FY24. Each team will provide three clients they are going to target for organic revenue growth and how they are going to close the deal.”
Is a meeting the only or best way to solve/accomplish the thing?
Relationship dominant groups may prefer to have meetings. But no one wants a meeting that really could have been an email.
Another key thing to understand is how your team and you get work done most effectively. Some people – usually extroverts – enjoy being in a group to solve problems, throw around ideas and come up with solutions. For them, meetings can be an effective way to do tasks and to build relationship.
Others – usually introverts – prefer to do their work on their own and then return to the group to synthesize. This might look like four people each working on their section of a presentation, coming together and reviewing the sections as a whole, and critiquing and changing. The bulk of the work and thinking were done solo, but the stitching together is better done as a team.
If you are strongly extroverted and much of your team is introverted, you can have conflict. You may want to work as a group, but others will get frustrated that they have to sit in a meeting rather than doing their work. When in doubt, ask. And refer to the answer to #1 – what are you trying to accomplish?
Who really needs to be in the meeting?
Each person at a company costs the company money. In services like consulting or advertising, most people have a billable rate. Let’s say you have ten senior people in a room and their average billable rate is $400. Every hour you have those ten people in a meeting is $4000 lost – unless of course the meeting itself is an actual billable hour. But you get the point – start to think of the cost of gathering people in a room and be intentional about it.
In some companies, people’s feelings will get hurt if they aren’t in certain meetings. When I did new business, I would often have people who wanted to be in a pitch for their own ego or political reasons. My rule at the time was that if you weren’t presenting, or your piece of the presentation wasn’t critical or should be done by someone else, you didn’t get to come to the meeting. I pissed off a few people but clients usually prefer a pitch that has the people who will actually work on their business, not the random strategy guy from the New York office who will never touch their business again.
Have I clearly articulated what the meeting is for and what we are hoping to accomplish?
I always try to say or understand at the beginning of a meeting who is running it and what we are going to accomplish. Someone needs to facilitate, even only if lightly to play time cop. If there isn’t a person owning the meeting, then chances are the meeting doesn’t need to be happening.
Check in at least once in the meeting to make sure it is helpful and going at the right pace.
We’ve all been in meetings where someone needs to read every word on the slide. We can all see, read and understand the slide in a few seconds. If you are running a meeting, please stay attuned to non-verbal signals, like people reading their email, or doing other work in the meeting, and address it. “I think I might be losing you – should we skip ahead? Speed things up?”
If you are in a meeting that is following these guidelines, please be considerate.
If you are a leader and your team runs meetings well, pay attention. Don’t look at email. Don’t do other work. Stay engaged. If you’re bored or the meeting is going badly, give feedback. It can be in the meeting, or it can be after the meeting.
If you’re the boss, your team has learned how to do meetings from you. So, if they suck, fix it. Teach them better.
One of the worst new business pitches I was ever in was for a huge corporation that asked for spec creative. They wanted us to work for free. We did – agencies do that, which is another thing that shouldn’t happen – and put together some good work.
In our presentation, which we worked hard on, we showed the work on a screen to seven executives. Not one of them looked up from their screens to see the free work we had done. Scrolling through slide after slide of good ideas, saying our piece to the profiles of 7 people who never looked up was one of the more demoralizing presentations of my career. If it had been my shop, or if that happened to me now, I’d pick up my computer and leave.
The point is people remember that kind of disregard for their work.
Make meetings better. People will appreciate you for it.