CREATE YOUR OWN PIE CHART:
What percentage of meetings you’ve attended in the last 30 days were:
— highly productive
— productive
— unproductive
— a waste of time
A discouraging number of our friends—sing along if you know the words—spend so much time in meetings they never get anything done. This makes us wonder sometimes about the usefulness of meetings as a concept.
Long-time Tom Peters Company facilitator John O’Leary deconstructs the problem:
It seems to me that the currency of work is conversation—in person, telephonic, electronic—and we’re all trying to manage this conversation. Meetings are an attempt at a structured form of live conversation. If so, how they’re set up and conducted can make all the difference. And given the resources tied up in meetings, they should produce results.
- Are you going to the right sort of meetings?
- How do you know?
- What are the top three barriers to effective meetings where you work?
- If you could write the ideal set of meeting guidelines, what would be in them? What would you leave out?
- Without going overboard, how would you apply the wisdom of Ecclesiates 6:11 to your meetings: “The more the words, the less the meaning”?
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I attended a meeting yesterday that was likely the best one in months. People were engaged; they let down their guard and were willing to be vulnerable to move the team ahead; and a considerable amount of work was accomplished in a short period of time. And we finished early!
Of course, it stands out by its exception. But to achieve something like that makes all the others bearable.
I’m with you most of the way, Glynn. I want to understand how to make more and more meetings as engaging and productive as the meeting you had yesterday. I want to have so many great meetings in a row that when one comes up short we don’t just plow through the agenda and then say, “Well, they can’t all be good, can they.” Instead, I want us to look at each other in process and say, “Something is wrong in this meeting—let’s fix it right now so we can accomplish what we came for, or postpone what we came for and accomplish something more pressing (even that means adjourning the meeting or reconfiguring the participants).”
If that’s impossible—if good meetings are isolated phenomena—I can live with that. But maybe we need to create a compendium of great meetings from all over to see if there are patterns from which we can learn. Just a thought…
Jim — it started when one person stepped out and spoke from the heart. And that encouraged the others. Then our boss walked in, saw what was going on, and wanted to leave so he wouldn’t disrupt it. We made him stay.
I don’t know if it’s possible for all meetings to be like this — but even if half were, think of the things that could happen. I’m with you.
Glynn, I love the detail that your boss saw what was going on and “wanted to leave so he wouldn’t disrupt it. We made him stay.” Is there a lesson—or at least a hypothesis—here for leaders and teams?