When it comes to meetings, make them count


"We have failed as a culture because we've come to accept that meetings are just inherently bad," said Patrick Lencioni, president of the Table Group, a California-based management consulting firm, and author of the awesomely named book Death by Meeting. "We're spending our time at meetings talking about things that aren't important, and that's crazy."


First, a meeting should include only the people who absolutely need to be there. There's no reason to bring the whole staff to a meeting unless it's about something the whole staff needs to hear, and even then, perhaps an email will suffice.

Next, he suggests breaking meetings up into four formats. Have a daily, five-minute huddle with your team members, just for a lightning-fast update on what everyone's doing. No sitting down, just a quick chat.


"Spend five or 10 minutes at the beginning of that meeting going over the critical elements of your business, then put together a real-time agenda for the rest of the meeting based on the most important things that need to be addressed," Lencioni said. "You only talk about the most relevant things. If somebody raises some huge topic, say, 'It's too big to talk about right now.' "


The fourth format Lencioni uses is an off-site meeting once a quarter: "That's where you step back, get away from the office, take a breath and re-evaluate how you're doing. Even just a couple hours or a half-day; it could be at a hotel nearby or a restaurant. 'How are we doing? Is our strategy still right? How are we operating as a team?' "


Alison Green, a career-advice columnist at AskAManager.org, believes calling meetings has become a knee-jerk reaction, one that sometimes reflects laziness on the part of managers. "There are lots of people in a lot of offices where, inexplicably, the default reaction is, 'We need to have a meeting about this,' " Green said. "And it's just not often the case. You could pick up the phone and talk to someone for three minutes and deal with it. Or just send an email. If it's just to convey information, you probably don't need to haul everyone into a room."

The first of her suggestions for improving meetings is: Pause before you request one. Make sure a gathering is necessary.




For final thoughts, I turned to Web personality Meeting Boy, an anonymous figure who unleashes funny and insightful meeting-related rants at MeetingBoy.com.


One of his primary suggestions for improving office life is to eliminate "status meetings," in which workers update the boss on what he or she is doing. Everyone ends up spending an hour in a meeting, when they could have each just spent five minutes conveying their information via email or in a quick one-on-one with the boss.

Meeting Boy offers these "Four Steps for a Successful Meeting":

1. Have an agenda.

2. Send it out ahead of time.

3. Stick to it.

4. Don't invite me.

When it comes to meetings, make them count 01/31/12 [Last modified: Tuesday, January 31, 2012 3:30am]


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