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Ron Ashkenas
April 22, 2016
Meetings frustrate everyone. There are too many of them, they take too much
time, and not enough gets done during and after.
It s easy to blame this on others the higher-ups who invite us, arrange the
agendas, and chair the meetings. We just show up, make our presentations, and
try to sound smart.
But we are all accountable for keeping meetings effective, whether we are
calling them or simply participating. If you are in charge, there are obvious
steps you need to take, most of which are covered in the countless books and
training courses about meeting management. If you re not officially in charge,
the things you should be doing to help keep everyone on track might not be as
clear but this doesn t mean you re off the hook. If you passively and
repeatedly attend poorly conceived and run meetings, then you re contributing
to the problem by reinforcing the bad behavior of others.
While challenging a meeting leader can be difficult especially when that
person is your boss or a senior manager if you find the right way to do it,
you can save everyone some valuable time.
In a large technology firm, for example, the CEO led a bi-weekly meeting of her
top 20 people to review the business and make key decisions. Although the CEO s
chief of staff prepared an agenda in advance, the CEO was a passionate, curious
person, who had a tendency to go off on tangents. So the meetings lasted
longer, often going hours beyond what was originally planned. Eventually, a
couple of the CEO s direct reports suggested to her that a third-party
facilitator be brought in to the meetings to help keep things on track. Much to
their amazement, she agreed. Rather than being offended, it turned out that she
too was feeling that the meetings were becoming inefficient but wasn t sure
what to do about it.
People won t always be this cooperative or open to feedback, so employees
should be prepared for resistance and tread with caution. In one company I
worked with, for example, the CEO liked to use his staff meetings to review
business reports line by line as a way of identifying problems a practice
that frustrated the team since everyone could read the reports ahead of time
and identify the issues in advance. When members of the team pushed back, the
CEO told them that this was the way he had run things for a long time and
insisted (in less than polite language) that he was not going to change a
thing. They then backed off, and only streamlined the review process after he
retired.
The point is that it takes a certain amount of courage to push back on someone
else s meeting, and it s unlikely that you ll always be successful. But if it s
clear that something has to be done in your organization, here are two
strategies that you might consider:
First, think about the standard principles for planning a productive meeting
having a clear purpose, inviting the right people, sending out pre-work,
developing an agenda and start your feedback there. If any of these can be
improved, it could have a big impact on meeting efficiency and outcomes. Plus,
these are tangible issues that can be discussed rationally with your boss or
other senior people. Most importantly, this conversation doesn t require you to
delve into a subjective assessment of meeting management behavior.
In one company, senior people were sending subordinates to regular meetings
when they couldn t attend. The problem was that they were sending these
substitutes so frequently, it had become difficult to actually make decisions.
Finally, a manager approached the boss about this policy. She walked through
the reasons why having substitutes was helpful (they can represent their teams
interests, and for the substitutes themselves, attending these higher-level
meetings supported their development), and why it might be problematic (the
practice caused delays in decision-making and sometimes hurt team dynamics).
Based on this, the boss was able to provide guidelines for when substitutes
would and would not be allowed.
A greater challenge is how to give feedback on the way someone else
(particularly, someone more senior) actually runs a meeting.
You certainly can t say, This was a lousy meeting, and here s what you should
do to make it better. But you can offer the leader some easy assessment
mechanisms that will help her reach her own conclusions about how well the
meeting is being conducted. This can be a meeting process checklist that people
fill out anonymously, a survey that participants can complete online, or quick
questions that everyone discusses at the end of every meeting. One manager
suggested to his boss that they conclude staff meetings with a structured
two-minute conversation in which everyone says what was good about the meeting,
and what should be done differently the next time. Naturally, after the first
few meetings, most of the feedback was positive, but eventually people started
testing the waters about possible changes. Eventually this led to crisper
decisions, less off-target discussions, and generally more efficient and
productive meetings.
With the amount of time that meetings take up, it s crucial to remember that
even if you re not in charge, you can contribute to a meeting s effectiveness
and productivity, particularly through small acts of courage. It might not
always work, but doing nothing won t work any better.
Ron Ashkenas is a Partner Emeritus at Schaffer Consulting. He is a co-author of
The GE Work-Out and The Boundaryless Organization. His latest book is Simply
Effective.