Welcome to the Potential Leader Lab. And I'm your host, Perry Maughmer. And today we're exploring the idea around creating meetings that don't suck the life out of your team. All right. So in all things that I do, I approach through the E three framework, and that means we leverage exploring, experimenting, and evolving as our means of navigating our leadership odyssey. And I also define leadership as having a positive impact on the lives of those we care about. And with this definition, every single one of us has both the opportunity and responsibility to lead in whatever part of the world it makes sense for us to do so. And if we all individually take these opportunities, I believe we can collectively make the world a better place. All right, so let's get started. Three quotes to put us in the right frame of mind about creating meetings that don't suck the life out of your team. The first one is from Jason Fried. Meetings should be like salt, a spice sprinkled carefully to enhance a dish not poured recklessly over every forkful. Too much salt destroys a dish. Too many meetings destroy morale and motivation. Thomas Sowell said people who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything. And Dave Barry said, if you had to identify in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved never will achieve its full potential. That word would be meetings. All right, so let's explore some stuff. This is a really fun one because I'm going to give you some facts and figures here just from some some research.
00:01:27
So I'll run through this relatively quickly. 47% of workers say meetings are the number one time waster at their office. Nearly 50% of the people now, it gets worse. It gets worse if you manage people. Since the average manager spends two full days per week consumed in meetings. To top that off, a recent survey found that 71% of senior managers felt meetings in their companies were unproductive and inefficient. Now Doodles State of Meetings report in 2019 found that excessive meetings annually cost the US economy an estimated 399 billion with a B dollars an over 16.5 billion hours. Professionals lose 31 hours of productivity on meetings every month, according to HR Digest. Research conducted by Wolf Management Consultants showed that 95% of meeting attendees missed part of meetings and 39% claim they doze off in the meeting room. There's there's also another thing called the meeting blast radius, which is getting real work done often requires long, uninterrupted blocks of work. And meetings are one of the biggest reasons why these blocks are so rare. And it takes 30 minutes when you're interrupted to get back to where you were. So. So just think about that. You need blocks of work to get real work done. If you have to go to a meeting 2 or 3 a day and then takes 30 minutes to get back to where you're working, how much work are you actually getting done? Now, Harvard Business Review surveyed 182 managers in a range of industries, and 65% said meetings keep them from completing their own work.
00:03:12
71% said meetings are unproductive and inefficient. 64% said meetings come at the expense of deep work. In that we know is professional activity performed in a state of distraction, free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit and create new value and prove your skill and are hard to replicate. And 62% said meetings missed opportunities to bring the team closer together. So why are some reasons that meetings are ineffective? Now, here's some people arriving late, unstructured or worse, no agenda or outline at all. A lack of a clear, cohesive goal. Time wasting activities by people in the meeting, like their eating or checking their phone. Topic repetition. You have meetings about the same thing over and over again. The lack of communication or over communication. Arguing or fighting in the meeting. This is one of the ones I see a lot. Sidebar conversations. You have a meeting going on and there's people talking around the table and then over talking and failure to listen. Now, if we want to talk about meetings that suck the life out of people, I believe that leaders are the worst offenders because in my opinion, they call me leaders often call meetings because it's an efficient way for them to communicate something that could or should have been an email.
00:04:34
I've seen it over and over again where leaders call a meeting and the meeting is actually for them to talk and everyone else to listen. That's not a good reason for a meeting. And before holding any meetings. I don't care what meeting you're going to. Always ask yourself the following three questions. What do I want people to think? What do I want people to feel and what do I want? Most importantly, I want them to do after we're done. Because I guarantee you, if you just ask yourself those three questions, you'll be a lot further ahead with your meetings. And then this last one is just one that I wanted to throw in there. Show me any job description where there's a line item that evaluates somebody on their meeting effectiveness. Does anybody's job description read attend meetings vigorously. It's so funny because meetings are not the work. I'm not saying that work never gets done in a meeting or you should never have meetings, but think about the work that you're challenged, you're challenging people to do in your organization and then think about the meetings that they have. I mean, I can tell you, I've seen people's calendars. They're they're booked, especially, to be honest with the with the pandemic and all the all the work from home. It's worse because now there are no breaks between meetings. It's like meeting after meeting after meeting after meeting. And I ask them, I ask people, I'm like, when do you do your work? And they're like, Well, that's that's what I keep asking.
00:06:06
Because in the meetings, that person's individual work is not getting done because everybody, as far as I know, has individual output. Even the even the people that are in charge, even CEOs, CFOs, CFOs, anybody. We all have work to do. We all have a job we're supposed to do. And meetings are typically not where that work gets done, because most of the work that we're challenged with as you move farther up in an organization is cognitive heavy lifting. Like you need blocks of time to think. In meetings are not that. It's a pet peeve of mine. It always has been. Meetings are not work. All right. So here's the here's some experiment. We'll move into the experiment phase. Let's talk about experimenting with some different things. Now, there's not a ton of these, but they're but they're pretty dramatic. Number one is how many people have ever gone through training on how to have a meeting. I mean, just think about it. How many people have had been trained on how to facilitate a meeting, how to prepare for a meeting, how to facilitate a meeting, any of those things. Now I want And the reason this is really important is because we bring people in organizations and we immediately we have limits on their spending. Some people can't aren't allowed to spend any money.
00:07:28
Some people are allowed to spend certain levels of money as they've been in the organization. But we'll allow people to call a meeting. And they're spending money. Look around the room in the meeting. How many people are in there? What's their average hourly rate? How long is the meeting? The meeting. If it lasts from 90 to 120 minutes is probably going to run you somewhere in the range of 500 to $1500 in actual true cost. That's not productivity cost. None of that. This is just this is how much you're paying the people to sit in that room together. We'll let people do that. I mean, we let people call meetings we have no I tell people that I ask them all the time. They tell me, well, I got this meeting, that meeting. I'm like, Well, what's the agenda? I don't know. I said, What do you mean you don't know? Well, there isn't one. Why are you going to the meeting? All you have is a topic. Why were you invited? What are you supposed to prepare for? How do you know if it's going to be a good meeting? Bad meeting? We don't we don't develop we don't offer that training, which we should. Every organization should have a training program for meetings. It should be the most important thing that they do. Because it's the biggest waste of resources. And morale killer. That there is. This is my favorite suggestion. Nobody will ever do it.
00:08:59
Make all meetings optional. If you get an invitation to a meeting and you don't see why you could add value or get value out of the meeting, you're not forced to go. I think that would stop a lot of the meetings. Because you'd have to sell your meeting. You'd have to make it so enticing. People would want to show up. It's I mean, think about it. It'd be worth it. Because if I looked at my work and said, Wow, this is so compelling, I'm going to take an hour out of my day to go to this meeting instead of working on the stuff I need to do. That's a pretty compelling statement, but you'd have to make it. Compelling. You can't just tell people you can't just get on their calendar and start inviting them to meetings. It's their choice if they can't add value or get value. The other. The other idea and again probably nobody will do this is have quality control on meetings, have somebody that goes in and sits in randomly on meetings and evaluates whether they're any good or not. I mean, we do it for everything else that we do. Why wouldn't we do it for meetings? Meetings are the biggest morale and time suck and resource suck we have. But we don't pay any attention to them. We just keep having them. It's a waste of time. I mean, in today's we are so focused on productivity. We're so we're so focused on all of those things that generating revenue and profitability and effectiveness and efficiency, but yet we still just back up meeting to meeting, to meeting, to meeting and meetings are not work.
00:10:44
In fact, I'm going to share. I'll share with you now I'm going to share a quote from Peter Drucker, the the father, the guru of all management. Here's a quote. Meetings are, by definition, a concession to a deficient organization. For one, either works or meets one cannot do both at the same time. Peter Drucker said that. Bears repeating meetings are, by definition, a concession to a deficient organization for one either meets or one works. One cannot do both at the same time. Just think about that. I also believe that annually I would recommend quarterly that leadership do a meeting audit of your organization, look at all the meetings that are being had and figure out why they're being had and if they should be had. It shouldn't just be because we've always done it. It shouldn't mean. The other thing is, most of those, to be honest with you, most meetings could be an email. Most meetings are just. We should never have a meeting where we give updates. You can do that in another format. You can do that much more efficiently in another format. But we should never sit around a table just listening to people tell us what they're doing. It's a waste of time. You have to figure out what you can only do sitting across the table from each other or virtually or however you want to have the meeting.
00:12:16
But if I'm going to bring people together, what's my output? And again, I'm going to go back to I would love for somebody to have this outline as a leader, I think it's imperative that you do that. You have clarity in your mind as to what you want people to think. What you want them to feel and what you want them to do. When the meeting is over. And that goes for retreat for a two day off site for an hour meeting. What do I want people to think, do and feel? Because all three of those are important. And if I don't have clarity around what I'm what I want out of those things, then why am I having the meeting? If I can't clearly say by the end of this 90 minutes, I want people to think this and I want them to feel like this and I want them to do this. Otherwise, why are we why are we getting together? It's a waste of time. And the last thing I'll tell you is that for every meeting, you should have at least three different roles. And you can if you have to play all three, you can. It's very hard to do so and you can switch these around. It isn't it isn't incumbent upon the same people every time.
00:13:23
But you need a facilitator, you need a time keeper, and you need a historian. Right. The first thing is you need somebody that's running the meeting, somebody that's in charge of the meeting to keep things moving per the agenda. It typically is not good to have because here's the other thing. You can't participate in the meeting and be the facilitator at the same time. It's a really hard thing to do. You're either one or the other. So if you if you're the one calling the meeting because you want to participate, then you can't be the facilitator. You can participate. Then you need a time keeper. If you have an agenda which you should have, then you have blocks of time for each of the things you're going to do. And the timekeeper is the one who says, Time's up on that. We spent 15 minutes. Move on. Now, I'm not saying that you have these hard and fast rules, but here's what happens if I. I'm just going to make it easy. If I have an hour meeting and I have four things on the agenda and each of them is 15 minutes, then at the end of the first 15 minutes, I can say as a facilitator, okay, your time's up on that topic. Do you want to move on? Do you need another five minutes? In which case the next one will only be ten minutes. We have to give and take because we have to stay on track and the group can say yes or no.
00:14:36
So there's still flexibility built in. But you have to make decisions. You can't just have a meeting that was supposed to be an hour go 45 minutes on one topic and then try to blow through the last three for 15 minutes and get nothing done. Or worse yet, for the love of God, don't make it into a two hour meeting. So again, three parts facilitator, time keeper, and most importantly, the historian. And that is somebody who's recording what the hell everybody's saying and what they committed to. I got to tell you, I'm sure I'm not the only one to experience this. What happens in a meeting? Typically, everybody's blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Somebody looks at their watch and goes, Oh, shit, this we got. This meeting's over. Everybody good? All right, we'll talk. We'll meet next time. We'll see you next time. And everybody leaves. Now, everybody at that point left that meeting with a completely different understanding of what was said and what everybody's supposed to do. And we only find that out later when somebody did something that wasn't supposed to be done or they didn't do something that was supposed to be done. And their claim is, Oh, I didn't know that. Because nobody furnished meeting minutes. Nobody. Nobody. The structure and discipline around a meeting is before you end. You should end the meeting ten minutes before it ends so that the last ten minutes are spent reaffirming everything that happened in the meeting and providing clarity for the people that attended.
00:15:59
All right. So here's what we decided. Step one. Step two, step three. Here's what Joe is going to do. Here's what Susan's going to do. Here's what here's what Jack's going to do. Everybody clear? Yep. Okay. You'll get I'll send the meeting notes out as well. So there's no misunderstanding. And if there is, we handle it right there. We don't wait for two weeks when somebody was supposed to do something that never got done and now they're in the doghouse. That's just silly. All right. So again, the ideas have three roles Facilitator, timekeeper, historian. Think about maybe doing QC on meetings, make meetings optional, and create a training program for your meetings. And then finally, as a leader, just for your own. Peace of mind. Thinking to yourself what I want people to think, feel and do. At the end of a meeting with me, if I'm going to hold this meeting, what do I want to do? And I go back to the same thing. I always tell you guys, it's not just about you. It's about this is happening in multiple layers and organization. So if you're not doing it and your folks aren't doing it, their folks aren't doing it, imagine the waste. And I don't see how we live with it given the time we live in and the focus on doing more with less.
00:17:15
We could actually get a lot more done if we did what we did more with less meetings. Because I'm guaranteeing you most people and organizations would celebrate not having them. They could actually get their work done. All right. So some closing quotes. I'm going to I'm going to tell you the one by Drucker again, because it bears repeating. Meetings are, by definition a concession to a deficient organization for one either meets or one works. One cannot do both at the same time. Now, this next one is from Patrick Lencioni in his book Death by Meeting. The single biggest structural problem facing leaders of meetings is the tendency to throw every type of issue that needs to be discussed into the same meeting like a bad stew with too many random ingredients. And then finally, Dale Dauten. Just think this one through. Meetings move at the speed of the slowest mind in the room. Meetings move at the speed of the slowest mind in the room. All right. So remember, all can, most won't and few do. And will you be one of those relentless few who explore and experiment and evolve so that you have a positive impact on the lives of those you care about? If your answer is yes, then you're already leading. And I thank you because the world needs what you have to offer and we need it now. Take care of yourself, take care of each other. And I hope to see you back in the lab soon.
