I ❤️ Meetings… …said no one ever. Here’s the thing, the wonderful thing about working with CEOs is that I’m able to point out the obvious. “I just have so many meetings, my assistant keeps me away from the worst of it, but my days are packed.” Said the CEO. “I blame the boss,” I […]
I ❤️ Meetings…
…said no one ever.
Here’s the thing, the wonderful thing about working with CEOs is that I’m able to point out the obvious.
“I just have so many meetings, my assistant keeps me away from the worst of it, but my days are packed.” Said the CEO.
“I blame the boss,” I replied.
“Wait, that’s me.”
Most meeting advice deals with the symptoms of meeting overload:
Start and end on time. No agenda, no meeting. Keep it to 15 minutes. Only invite the people who need to be there. Take better notes. Set roles. Share actions. Have a no-meetings Wednesday. Batch them into mornings. Decline when aren’t needed. Turn meetings into emails. Turn emails into meetings. Blah blah.
When you look at slow businesses, you see communication bottlenecks. And meetings do solve that but they introduce secondary effects. Elephant in the room: there’s no time to do the actual work.
When you have a 1-2-1 with someone, why bother emailing them when you can wait until the meeting? Why read the email when you can ask about it in the meeting? Why read the board pack when the CEO will go through it line by line? I need to read the 20-slide deck ahead of the meeting with you that—shoot—I’m 3 minutes late for…
The fix is straightforward, but it’s not easy:
- Reduce cadence. Have a hot week when meetings happen, followed by a cool week to do the work. If people have to wait for a meeting, behaviour will change. (See down there for a video on how to do this 👇)
- Clarify communication types. Downloads, FYIs, feedback, simple asks, and many more do not need a meeting. Create a list of things that don’t need meetings and stick to it. Find a better way (e.g. voice notes, Looms, etc).
- Meetings need a purpose. Define the purpose for each. If you can’t, it’s not worthy of a meeting. Set the purpose clearly for everyone and prepare: require a pre-read. Create the ‘asks’ of the attendees ahead of time. Do the work to make the meeting work.
Culture will, of course, completely eat this for breakfast. That’s why most leaders treat the symptoms, not the causes.
If we take step and define culture, we can see it’s nothing more than a set of shared beliefs and behaviours. Both need to change to fix meeting overload.
The beliefs sound like this: “We need a meeting to make decisions.” “If it’s important, it should be discussed live.” “Inclusion means inviting everyone.” “The senior person will clarify it front of everyone.” “I’ll deal with it in the meeting.”
And the behaviours follow: work gets deferred to the meeting, updates replace decisions, people show up unprepared, accountability is diluted across the room, and thinking happens collectively rather than individually.
Change the beliefs, and the behaviours shift, shift the behaviours and things change. Keep them, and no amount of calendar hacks will save you.
Next time I’ll dig into beliefs as a way of changing behaviours. Now stop reading this, you’re probably late for a meeting…