5 steps to fix meetings and hit your most ambitious goals faster
You can double your team’s speed without burning people out.
The good news is that the process for doing this is simple and makes an immediate impact.
The bad news is that simple doesn’t mean easy.
There are 5 specific steps you can follow. It’s important to understand what’s happening in the workplace that gets in the way. And to understand how meetings are a pivot point between high performance and the dysfunction that breeds burnout and inflated costs.
Most people at work are only “half-in” and unclear on why it should be any different.
8 of 10 people in the workplace are going half-speed because they aren’t really engaged in their work.
2 of 3 people experience burn out.
3 of 4 aren’t sure about their leaders’ direction.
Add these things up and you end up with disengaged, unaligned teams that lack clear direction.
All the buzzwords in the world won’t fix the one thing that magnifies these stats.
Phrases like innovation, adaptive organization, agile, grit, high growth, high performing, and “highly aligned” all sound like great ideas.
But the one place on every team where these things could become something practical and meaningful is the one place that sucks motivation from the marrow of peoples bones.
Meetings are the pivot point
Meetings are the pivot point. They are the fork in the road between inspired performance and burnout. If there was a workplace rally cry that everyone could agree on, it would be: “we hate meetings.”
Meetings can be a way to drive inspired execution. They can be a place where people reconnect and realign. They can be a place where teams get crazy amounts of things done. It’s an irony that almost all meetings seem to have the opposite effect.
Meetings waste from 4 to 6 hours per person every week. Estimates place the cost in the US at $37B per year. And still teams and businesses continue to force themselves through bad meetings. Fun fact: the length and frequency have meetings have more than doubled in the past 50 years
This is a fatal luxury
If your company is growing fast or depends on innovation, this type of waste drives your team into dangerous territory.
.1% (that’s point 1%, as in a tenth) of a percent of companies make the shift from 10mm to 100m in sales. And still, most companies give up on doing anything about these other trends.
The good news
After a lot of research, trial and error, we’ve honed a few specific things you can do get rid of most meetings, and transform the ones that are left into a discipline that drives inspired performance, adaptability, and all the cool buzzwords.
Take these five steps to fix your meetings
1. Have a game plan
Design thinking is a high-hype word, but it's worth thinking of this as a product design exercise. The meeting is your product. The consumer is the people in the meeting.
To respect their time, be intentional; don’t “wing it”. Be prepared so people don’t get anxious and frustrated. Have an agenda and send it out early. More on this agenda soon.
2. Divide and conquer
Bucket your meeting types so you can create specific processes that will check all of these boxes. Typically, the types of meetings you need are going to be
Daily
Weekly
Ad-hoc/working sessions
Period/like monthly, quarterly
Annual
Each meeting type will have its own consistent agenda. The agenda sections and timing should be thesame for every meeting of a given type.
3. Tether every meeting to your one story
The only “thing” I’ve seen draw as much hate as meetings, is the phrase “company vision”. This is usually a function of having a really bad one, or not having one at all - or lastly, having a great one and doing nothing it with it. If you have a vision, and you aren’t using it to guide decisions and execution, there isn’t much point.
We’ve got resources you can use to build your vision and tie everything back to it. It needs to Include your scoreboard and your current short-term goals. You can reference it in every meeting - though the daily check in meeting won’t need it.
4. Outline the rules of the game
The ”game” here is to have a great meeting. A great meeting helps you get more of the right things done. It helps you ignore distractions, and it helps you solve problems together. It should help everyone dial in to what you are doing and how they fit. As with any game, having clearly understood rules is critical.
Set up regular meeting times and ensure everyone respects that time. This is the first step to ensure it isn’t wasted. If you are concerned about taking a hard line, buy water guns and squirt latecomers. Alternately, keep score of who shows up late and make it clear on your scoreboard.
Carve out a clear agenda with time to quickly review the vision, your scoreboard, and progress toward goals. Make sure there is also time built in for constructive conflict and problem-solving.
5. Be intentional about culture
Your meetings are a window into your culture. You can guage your culture by taking stock of how your teams view your meetings. Do your meetings happen regularly? Do people respect them? Do they rate them highly?
Part of this requires you to ensure your vision includes the specific behaviors that are most important to your culture. The behaviors you discourage and encourage are your culture. If people understand those, your meetings become a way to encourage them and call them out. This isn’t done with a lot of fanfare, just part of recognizing “this is what we do”.
And those principles and values become part of the rules for how you interact during your meeting.