The Dark Side of Meetings: Pitfalls Keeping You From Success
When is the last time you walked out of a meeting and said, “That was a kick ass meeting?”
Did you laugh out loud? Or maybe you quietly said to yourself, “never”?
I hear you. I’ve sat through crappy meetings and felt the frustration build inside.
When I bring up the topic of meetings, people generally groan, and tell me something like:
Meetings are the bane of my existence.
Meetings suck.
Meetings are a waste of time.
When I dig in more, I realized there are common traps these crappy meetings have in common. By recognizing these pitfalls, we can eliminate them and take our meetings from sucktastic to kick ass.
Unfocused Meetings
Meeting often lack agendas and clear objectives. People mistakenly believe that meetings do not require preparation. You need to be clear about the purpose of the meeting, and what success looks like at the end of the meeting.
Try starting a meeting with this statement: “Success at the end of this meeting means …” Some examples might include:
We’ve narrowed our choices down to 3 options.
We’ve made a decision about …
We have a project plan for …
We created a draft for …
We brainstormed possible solutions for …
We have a common understanding of the challenges with this project.
If the meeting objective is clear, then it is easier to call out tangents. Sometimes, tangents bring up important points, challenges or ideas, but if they do not relate to the objective, add them to a parking lot and determine the best way to address them (someone does research, hold a different meeting, make a note to review later). Be aware of getting sucked into addressing the tangent unless it helps you achieve your meeting objective (in which case it’s not really a tangent). Having a clear meeting objective at the top of the agenda, or shared somewhere everyone can see helps keep the meeting focused, and gives everyone permission to call out the tangents and stay on track.
Not Enough Time/Too Long
Booking an appropriate amount of time can be challenging. Ensure you understand the objectives and that you have enough time, but not too much. Try to push yourself to book just a little bit less time. Try to give participants all the information they need in advance so they come prepared.
“Work will expand to fill the time allotted for its completion.”
Have you ever procrastinated a project or task, only to discover it didn’t take as long as you thought it would? Often even if we start, we spend more time on it than we need to (hello PowerPoint slideshow - I see you here).
If you give yourself two weeks to complete an assignment, you will take two weeks. If you give yourself five days, you’ll do it in five days. Like a teeter-totter, there is a magic spot where you have enough time, but not extra that is wasted. Experiment and try to find that perfect time limit. Pushing the group a little bit might also help keep everyone focused.
Back-to-Back Meetings
When we mostly met in person, we often needed to travel from one meeting to the next, so we would stop to use the washroom or get a drink. With virtual meetings becoming more frequent, we have lost our “travel time” (even if it was just a couple of minutes). We click “leave” or “end” on one meeting and “join” for the next.
We need breaks. A quick Google search yields pages of articles and links supporting this.
Consider making your meetings five minutes shorter to give yourself (and everyone else) a chance to get up and move between meetings, use the washroom, grab a drink and just rest their brain a bit.
Ensure you start your meetings on time and end them on time (5 minutes early) to facilitate these breaks and so meetings don’t run over into each other. Additionally, when you start late, you disrespect those who came on time and teach participants that they can come late since they don’t miss anything.
Nothing is Accomplished
Decisions not made, or next action steps not identified are potentially the biggest meeting frustrations as it leaves participants feeling like they have wasted their time.
It’s too easy to go around and around and never decide or determine the next step. Starting a meeting with clear objectives makes it easy to determine what critical decisions or next steps need to happen.
Be clear about decisions made and tasks assigned and review these at the end of the meeting. Another challenge is that there is no follow up after the meeting.
This Meeting Could Have Been an Email
Have you been to a meeting where someone just read a report to you, or presented something you could have read yourself? Meetings are expensive, so use the time the most effectively. Reading out a report is not efficient. Send information out in advance and use the meeting time to discuss, debate and decide.
Look at the purpose of the meeting and use time together to debate, brainstorm, clarify, solve and discuss, rather than simply inform. Focus on two-way discussion. If you are rolling out a new initiative, give people the information in advance and use the meeting to solicit questions. As a bonus, your I-Styles and C-Styles will appreciate having the extra time to prepare and process.
While there is a time to share information (like a full company meeting), try to keep these types of meetings to a minimum, rather than the standard for meetings.
Distractions
Being in virtual meetings has made multi-tasking easier (and maybe expected). Set clear expectations that people are fully engaged in meetings. Ensuring people have breaks, are participating in the meeting, are accomplishing something will help people stay engaged too.
Wrong People in the Room
Do you attend meetings where they don’t need you? Are you missing people you need?
Paying attention to inviting the right people is an important aspect of planning a meeting. Ensure you have all the people you need and that you don’t invite people who don’t need to be there. If you need someone for just part of the meeting, try to structure it so they only have to attend that portion of the meeting. It is more work and sometimes requires some creativity, however, the improved engagement outweighs the challenge.
No One Manages the Meeting
Chairing successful meetings is a skill (although we rarely teach it as such). An ineffective meeting chair can mean:
A few people may dominate the discussion while others do not contribute
The group goes off on a tangent and doesn’t accomplish the meeting objective
The meeting objective isn’t clearly identified
The meeting starts late or runs long
Decisions aren’t made; next steps are not identified
Crappy Meetings Cost Money
So What?
In addition to being frustrating and demotivating for attendees, meetings have a high price for organizations. A quick search yielded these statistics:
31 hour per month (per employee) are spent in unproductive meetings (Source)
$37 Billion in salary cost of unnecessary meetings for US businesses (Source)
Executives spent an average of 10 hours per week in meetings in the 1960s and today, that average is 23 hours per week (Source)
37% of meetings start late (Source)
In addition to the monetary cost, there is an equally important cost to productivity, engagement and motivation.
It is unlikely that you can eliminate all meetings, however, make the ones you do have pass the kick-ass test. If you want help with that, check out my free checklist to running a kick-ass meeting.
