The truth about meetings

16 Feb

Throughout last week I was asking for your thoughts on meetings on social media. Having spent the week delving into the good, the bad and the just plain infuriating, I thought I’d share what I learnt.

The first thing I discovered is that pretty much everyone knows what good practice looks like and absolutely everyone knows what makes a bad meeting. So, if we know what makes a meeting run like clockwork and what drives our colleagues crazy, why don’t we actually do all the good stuff? Most of the time, it’s not a lack of knowledge that’s the problem, there is almost always an underlying reason.

Here are some of the reasons why people (and by people I also mean you) don’t make meetings as easy as they could be.

Fear of excluding/being excluded

Meetings often have too many attendees on the invite list. Many hands may make light work but too many cooks can spoil the broth. I’ve heard people in some organisations say that they are worried about causing offence if they leave people off the invite. They tell me that they themselves feel a bit offended if they’ve been left out and they don’t want to upset anyone else.

The problem here is inviting people based on how it looks, rather than according to need, which would be fairer to everyone. It turns out that worrying about how things look is a bit of a theme…..

How will I look?

Attending and participating in meetings to enhance reputation rather than to further the task seems to be the easiest way to infuriate your colleagues. All too often people accept invites to meetings they don’t need to attend because they are thinking:

How will it look if I don’t attend? (fear of being judged)
Will people think I’m not a team player? (worrying about office politics)
Will our department be out of the loop if the meeting happens without me? (fear of missing out)
I have to turn up and speak so that people know I’m important to the cause (raising your profile)

This concern for how we come across also causes us to be bad participants too. Either because we feel the need to talk so we can show how knowledgeable we are in front of important people or by not participating at all for fear of looking incompetent or being ‘caught out’.

There is pressure in any business to be seen to be useful and as a result, many minutes and even hours can be lost by career grandstanding. In truth, no one is thinking of you at all, your colleagues just want to get the job done.

Preparation

We know that it is needed but we have all been guilty of not doing it. Why?

The biggest complaint is not having time. I understand that we are all extremely busy these days but we have to ask ourselves if this is really true. After all, 15 minutes preparing a meaningful meeting can save an hour of each participants time. Why won't we spend 15 minutes preparing, yet we will happily waste a whole hour in a meeting that doesn’t achieve anything?

Not only have we lost that hour but we have also lost the opportunity to set expectations for future meetings which are likely to run more smoothly once people realise you run a tight ship.

Perhaps it’s because preparation relies on you alone and being in a meeting means having other people share the load with us?

Fear of taking the lead

Your colleagues and clients are crying out for you to be a strong leader when you are in the chair. The problem is that we don’t want to come across like a headteacher to people we work with every day, but manage a meeting poorly and you’ll lose the room pretty quickly.

Ground rules: I’ve observed that people generally don’t like to lay down ground rules to colleagues. When running a workshop on meetings recently I had a room of 25 people practising their facilitation skills and only one covered off ground rules. There is a concern that we are patronising people by covering ground rules because they are intelligent and they already know this stuff. That’s true, they do, but that’s not the point of ground rules. The point of ground rules is accountability. When you get people to “yes” to switching off mobile phones, for example, it makes it’s much harder for them to break the rule because they have publicly stated that they won't (this is called self-consistency theory).

Actions: We are equally reluctant to delegate and to ask our colleagues to commit to a specific actions and timescales. Again, we know that people understand what their responsibilities are but making a public commitment to action keeps us all honest. In this respect holding people to account is an act of support, not a punishment, yet we struggle to shake the feeling of being bossy.

Facilitation skills: Another challenge with taking the lead is that it requires genuine skill. Facilitating discussions, moving the conversation on, dealing with difficult participants, gaining consensus, getting commitment to specific actions and handling conflict are just a few of the skills required. Not only does a strong chair need to be able to do all these things but they need to be able to do them whilst thinking of their feet and often whilst participating in the meeting themselves. It is really hard to do well if it’s not your day to day job and for many people attempting to do this and to risk doing it badly, means feeling exposed. After all, you’re a professional aren’t you supposed to just be good at this?

For many people, the fear of leading a meeting badly is a worse prospect than not leading at all.

Jump into the lifeboat with me

I’m going to shoot straight from the hip with this one.

Making a decision by yourself is scary and sometimes we like to have other people in the lifeboat with us. If I make the decision it’s on me. If we make the decision it’s on all of us and frankly, that feels safer. Many working cultures are still command and control. Few companies reward people for taking even the most reasonable risks and the culture of an organisation can create the practice of backside covering. Do you really need everyone else’s input or are you just looking for reassurance?

Work out the average hourly rate of people in your meeting. Multiply that by the number of people in your meeting. Now multiply that by the number of meetings you have a year. That’s a really expensive hand-holding exercise. May I cheekily suggest some coaching rather than pulling everyone else into that inflatable dinghy with you?

Ownership

This is the biggie. We are very quick to point the finger of blame for bad meetings at other people but if all of us are in the right who are those elusive ‘other people’ that make meetings a misery?What we often forget is that to other people we are those annoying idiots that make meeting time pass slower than a three-toed sloth. Before complaining about others, our first port of call is to ask ourselves one very important question:

How did I contribute to this situation?

This applies to two areas:

Ourselves-Ask yourself:

Have I checked if I even need to be at the meeting? Do I need to be there for all of it? What is my role?
Do I understand the meeting objectives? Have I asked for more detail on the agenda? What do I require from the meeting?
Am I prepared? Did I read the papers? Have I asked if I need to prepare anything?
Have I switched my notifications off? Have I put my out of office on?

Others-How have I created the situation for other people?

If people are turning up late is it because they have back to back meetings? In which case, could I start the meeting at 10 past the hour? Or finish at 10 to the hour? Is there much on the agenda? Why not book in a 40-minute meeting and really focus my participant's minds?
If people aren’t contributing appropriately did I prepare a strong enough agenda? If there are papers to read did I allow adequate time? Did I explain once or have I reminded people? Did I make it easy?
If people are eating in the meeting check if you have scheduled the meeting over lunch (12-2pm?). Have you scheduled breaks? If people want coffee would it be easier to provide it than to wait for everyone to make it out of the queue at Starbucks?
Have I called a meeting for something that can be addressed by email or by some other method?
Did I ask everyone to agree to the ground rules at the start? Are we all agreed on what is acceptable? The use of phones and Ipads is annoying but is it ok for people to use these for taking notes? Are we agreed?

What have I missed?

These are just a few of the underlying issues causing bad meetings, I could go on and on but hopefully, it’s given you some clues as to why you and your colleagues contribute to the problem. If each of us took responsibility for asking for a specific agenda, challenging unhelpful contributions and steering our meetings towards decision and actions we can save our colleagues, clients and ourselves a lot of time, money and hassle.

So next time you’re thinking that maybe none of us is as smart of all of us, just pause and ask yourself if it’s more a question of none of us is as dumb as all of us.

Want some personal development tips to help you achieve your goals?

Michelle Pratt https://www.divedeeperdevelopment.com