Stop Stinking Up Your Meetings
Recently Shopify launched a meeting cost calculator displaying price tags on meetings. Yes, meetings are expensive, especially at the executive level. I’ve heard from many leaders how meetings eat up their day and many times don’t get anywhere.
Often the discussions about how to run an effective meeting are structural in nature. Let’s determine the type of meeting, the agenda, the decision making process, etc.
This is important, yet insufficient on its own.
What I have found in my coaching practice is that one of the biggest determinants of a successful meeting is not just knowing who is in charge or “chairing” the meeting, but the mindset of this chair.
Two chief complaints I hear about executive meetings are:
Assertion: the chair uses the meeting to assert their opinion
Avoidance: the chair uses the meeting to kick the can and avoid making a decision
Either way members of the meeting leave disgruntled with some version of “well that’s an hour I’ll never get back.” In other words the meeting stunk, which can be a hit to the chair’s credibility. So this post is for you, my chairs, whether you are chairing a meeting because you volunteered or were volunteered for the role.
What’s going to gain you credibility points with meeting members is your commitment to the objective of the meeting and your finesse in helping meeting members get there. This is quite the opposite of the self-serving chair. Antony Jay, BBC executive and author of books including Corporate Man and Management and Machiavelli, wrote that the chair’s main focus “become[s] not the act of imposing his will on the group but of imposing the group’s will on any individual who is in danger of diverting or delaying the progress of the discussion and so from realizing the objective.”
So how do we support meeting members realizing the objective of the meeting?
The obvious items discussed are bookends. First is to clearly define the objective in the first place. Agenda setting. Answering the question, “What do we want (out of this meeting)?”
The other bookend is to acknowledge what we learned from the meeting and determine next steps or “the action plan”. Answering the question, “What do we do next?”
But what about the responsibilities of the chair that lie in between? Here are a few other key responsibilities of the chair role:
Clarify: any group discussion is ripe for misunderstanding and confusion. As chair, two powerful questions to deploy during a meeting can be:
What do you mean by [x]? (to uncover assumptions that can derail the conversation)
What’s behind [x]? (to uncover experience or facts that the contributor knows but forgot to share with the group)
This allows you to facilitate the conversation and identify more points of understanding and connection across members.
Balance: there tend to be people who speak a lot in meetings and people who speak a lot less. Your role as chair is to encourage idea sharing. That means:
Jump in and invite: tactfully jump in when someone has gone on too long belaboring their point without sharing new data, and invite others who are more shy or more junior to contribute.
Shut down the shut-downers: when someone has the courage to make a suggestion and another members comes in with some version of “Oh I don’t know about that,” pump the brakes and enforce the norm that all ideas are welcome.
End: “This is the song that never ends” is not what you want to come to mind with your meetings. A powerful presenter doesn’t trail off in their sentences. A powerful meeting doesn’t trail off either. Before a summary and action plan happen, the discussion has to end. The chair has to identify that end intentionally. End the meeting when:
The members have reached an agreement
The members have not reached an agreement because: 1) more data or people are required, 2) less people are required - and this decision can actually be taken offline and determined by a subset of the members, 3) more time is needed to digest the information.
People can smell the self-serving nature of a meeting a mile away. Leading the meeting does not mean generating the winning idea or pushing off a decision because you haven’t generated the winning idea yet. Falling into that trap will be costly, and not just for the minutes wasted. Leading the meeting means you are serving the objective of the meeting over all else and empowering the brilliant minds assembled in the room to get there.
