Meetings aren’t the problem, the way you run them is

We’ve all been there. We’ve sat through meetings full of endless debate where it’s obvious that 90% of attendees didn’t review the material you sent out beforehand. Then, by the end, no real decision has been reached and you schedule another meeting to rehash the same things and try to make some semblance of progress. When you reconvene, any decisions you did happen to make are remembered incorrectly, and you’re back to square one.

Even worse are the meetings to prepare for a bigger meeting. Even seemingly meaningful recurring meetings can be a lesson in inefficiency where we block everyone’s calendar off and half the time just enter into chats or debates without any clear objective. It’s no wonder some professionals have such an aversion and hatred towards meetings. I’ve worked with leaders who are so anti-meeting that they reject nearly every meeting they’re invited to. That is not the answer either. I even saw a leader post on LinkedIn recently that they won’t accept a meeting invite if it’s not multiple days or even a week in advance. To me, this demonstrates the problem. If you loved meetings and loved collaborating with your colleagues, wouldn’t you be more anxious/willing to meet to get problems solved?

The underlying problem is not with meetings themselves…it’s with how we plan & conduct them and what we do afterwards. The hesitation to accept meetings speaks volumes on the quality of the meeting not meetings themselves. If we can solve the lack of quality, we can dramatically improve morale, teamwork, and even agility.

Problems with Most Meetings

It turns out that most meetings have 4 common problems that turn what should be effective collaboration sessions into exercises in patience, tolerance, and endurance. It is my hope that by bringing these problems to light as well as some suggestions I have found to work for overcoming them, we can all collaborate more effectively and be much more excited when we get a meeting invite.

There is No Clear Objective

The first problem I’ve observed with many problematic meetings is that there is no clear objective defined beforehand. This results in everyone in the meeting having a different idea of what we’re even there to do. Also important to note is that having an agenda is not the same thing as having an objective. An agenda is useful and important, but it is not enough. The goal for what you would like to accomplish should be completely clear ahead of time. This helps everyone in the meeting focus on an outcome. It also allows us to evaluate at the end whether the meeting was successful.

Recommended solutions:

1. Set objectives for every meeting — if you want to increase the effectiveness of meetings, start defining a meeting objective in every meeting invite you send out. At one company we implemented a rule that if there was no objective defined for the meeting, invitees were encouraged to reject the meeting (or request that an objective be added before accepting).
2. Review objectives at the start of, and throughout the meeting — the objective should be reviewed at the beginning of the meeting and the meeting facilitator should make that their north star to keep the meeting on track. If discussion is veering of course or time is running out, they can gently remind everyone of the objective and defer side conversations for after the meeting.
3. Evaluate whether the meeting objective was met — having a clear objective from the outset makes it simple to keep track of how often the meeting objective is being met. Quantifying meeting success can help improve your meetings over time. This can be done in a few ways. First, in the meeting recap email that should go out after the meeting (more on this later), clearly state whether the meeting was a success (achieved objective) or failure (did not achieve the objective). If you define your objectives well enough there shouldn’t be a question. Calling a meeting a “failure” even if good insight came out of it may sound like strong language, but it helps create a culture of focusing on a specific objective, solving it, and then letting everyone get on with their day. It shows respect, and will greatly improve company morale around meetings.
   
   Second, you can keep a spreadsheet or some kind of record of the date of the meeting, attendees, and success/failure of the objective. This gives you some data to review periodically and ammunition for meeting improvement initiatives.

Attendees Show Up Unprepared

Another problem that can cause a meeting to get derailed is when attendees show up having no background on the topic for discussion. This can arise because either no material was sent out ahead of time for them to review, or even worse, material was sent but attendees failed to review it. Either way without a shared understanding of the topic for discussion, it can be very hard to achieve any useful objective.

Recommended solutions:

1. Avoid ‘status update’ meetings — status update meetings (or meetings where the only purpose is to update each other on progress) are a tremendous waste of time and should be avoided unless absolutely necessary. These suck the life out of everyone and often are geared at one or two people who would rather just waste everyone else’s time than take the time to keep themselves informed. Even daily scrum meetings like “standups” should be geared more around holding each other accountable, identifying roadblocks to progress, and figuring out who needs help, rather than just hearing what everyone worked on the previous day. (That information can be had from scrum software like Jira). Meetings are for those things that truly need collaboration.
2. Send out material for review ahead of time — Jeff Bezos famously banned power points from meetings at Amazon. Instead he sends out memos written in narrative form and requires all attendees to read them. This is a powerful way to make meetings more meaningful. Same thing with design review or brainstorming meetings. Scope the meeting ahead of time and send out background material so the meeting can be spent accomplishing an objective rather than getting everyone up to speed. This approach also avoids the even worse, but common approach of pretending you know what you’re talking about and making decisions from the hip.
3. Review background material at the beginning of a meeting — if everyone in the meeting has not read the background material (or even if they say they have) a good practice can be forcing everyone to review background material silently at the beginning of the meeting. Jeff Bezos takes this approach with his meetings. The reasoning is that it’s better to take some of the time of the meeting to all get on the same page and then proceed as opposed to everyone just shooting from the hip. I have also found this approach to be valuable. In my role as a design leader, my background material are often personas, requirements, wireframes, or mockups. Often, I will just summarize the background material rather than make everyone read it. However you do it, getting everyone on the same page before continuing with the meeting is extremely valuable.
4. End the meeting — I have also been in environments where leaders would abruptly end the meeting if people show up unprepared or make those attendees leave. It could seem harsh, but it often gets the point across and it is preferable to that person wasting everyone else’s time.

Meetings are not Facilitated Well

One of the biggest problems I have observed with meetings in today’s business world is that very little or no attention is given to how the meeting is ran. This encompasses everything from identifying roles, to keeping everyone focused on the objective, to structuring the agenda and normalizing the power struggle. Facilitation is a skill that has to be honed. Improving your facilitation skills are vital in turning meetings from dreadful to effective. Just letting a meeting happen how it’s going to happen is one of the worst things you could do for morale and one of the principal causes why most people hate meetings.

Recommended solutions:

1. Clearly identify roles at the beginning of the meeting — something that is essential, is to identify who has which role in a meeting at the beginning of the meeting. This helps set clear expectations and provides a facilitator with ammo to help the meeting move along. There can be others, but the main roles in a meeting should be: facilitator (person running the meeting), decider (person making decisions when difference of opinion exists and you need to move on), participants, and note taker. By clearly identifying roles at the beginning you set expectations and meetings tend to run much smoother.
2. Separate the ‘facilitator’ and ‘decider’ role — one hang up I see often with roles is that whoever called or is running the meeting often tries to take on the role of decider automatically. This makes facilitation very difficult especially if you’re not the highest ranking employee in the meeting. If you are the decider, then the best thing to do is to ask someone else to facilitate (run) the meeting. That way they can turn to you when things need to move on and ask for a decision. It is also important to emphasize that a decider is not always needed for every decision. He/she is just there to help move the meeting forward when time is running out and the meeting needs to move on to be able to accomplish the stated objective.
3. Establish time limits and enforce them strictly — this can be challenging. At the beginning I say something along the lines of: “We’re really glad everyone could come help us _____(objective) today. Just by way of explanation, we have a lot to get through today. So I am going to be setting a timer for each agenda item. When the timer goes off, I will be cutting the activity off and we’ll need to move on. This isn’t directed at any one person or intended to be mean. It simply is to help us move along and accomplish all we want to today. We definitely value your time and don’t want to keep you longer than we scheduled for this.” This helps set expectations ahead of time and using a timer provides an audible notification of when time is up to prevent anyone from getting upset. Then if someone tries to keep writing or talking, you actually DO have to cut them off. Unless of course you legitimately need more time. Then you can state that to the group as a conscious decision.
4. Keep things moving — the number 1 job of a meeting facilitator is to keep things moving toward accomplishing the objective. The facilitator should not allow side conversation or tangents to derail the meeting. It is their job to keep everyone constantly focused on the task at hand and encourage topics not related to the objective to be taken “offline”. Also, it is ok and recommended for the note taker to capture these unrelated items being paused for now so that they don’t get lost. The decider or facilitator can later follow up to make sure the additional conversations took place. Some fantastic ideas originate this way but we can’t allow them to derail the objective of the meeting.
5. Normalize the power struggle-some people are naturally more passionate or aggressive than others. This can totally derail the meeting. If this starts to happen in a meeting it is essential that the facilitator shift the focus onto someone who hasn’t spoken yet. This tends to go a lot better if you have clearly identified roles at the beginning of the meeting. If the same people keep attempting to take over the meeting, it can be beneficial to go around the room and give everyone a turn to express their thoughts (ideally with a time limit). This also has the added benefit of encouraging the quieter attendees to participate more.

Lack of a Dedicated Note Taker

Another pitfall of many meetings I have attended has been the lack of a dedicated, assigned note-taker. Meeting attendees will take notes for themselves, but often everyone just assumes that someone else captured the action items and decisions or else everyone remembers it differently after the fact. Even worse is when no one takes notes which leaves no record of decisions to look back on later. It also gives you no way of tracking meeting effectiveness later.

Recommended solutions:

1. Choose a dedicated note taker — choose someone who is great at taking notes and assign them to take notes. This works best if they are not one of the main contributors to the meeting but can work even if they are as long as they know that everyone will be relying on them to capture the important points of the meeting.
2. Restate decisions, action items, or big questions that arise—the facilitator should restate any major decisions, action items, or big questions that come up during the course of the meeting and make direct eye-contact with the note taker to ensure they get captured. This also will allow any discrepancy or inaccuracy to be cleared up before it is captured. This does not mean that the note taker needs verbal confirmation before recording anything, simply that the most important items should be verbally repeated to make sure everyone is on the same page.
3. Summary emails — the note taker should summarize notes, decisions, and action items and send it out in an email to the entire group in attendance. This will remind everyone what was accomplished, and what still needs to be done, by when, and by whom. It also serves as a paper trail in case disagreements come up later on what was decided. It can also be extremely helpful to summarize meeting roles as well. Having a record of who was the decider and who was the facilitator at a minimum can be very useful information to recall later if questions on the decision come up.
4. Notes should be publicly accessible — it is also important that the full notes can be viewed and accessed at minimum by everyone that was in the meeting. This can eliminate a lot of miscommunication or debates later on.

Conclusion

So in summary, if you want to have better meetings and actually enjoy them, ensure that there’s a clear objective, attendees show up prepared or provide them with the needed background at the beginning of the meeting, facilitate meetings intentionally, and assign a dedicated note taker who can ensure everyone understands what was accomplished. Culture doesn’t change overnight, but as you do these things you will be surprised how enjoyable meetings can become and how collaborative your work relationships can be.

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