Transform Your Meetings Culture: The Secrets to Masterful Meetings
By Michael Wilkinson, CMF
Managing Director, Leadership Strategies, Inc.
“That was an awful meeting. What a waste of my time!”
How often have you had this same thought? Why do we tolerate such bad meetings? Consider the last meeting you attended that was run by someone else. How many of these pitfalls were evident?
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So, are most of the meetings inside of your organization productive? Do most of them achieve their desired end? Are most of them masterful?
In this brief, the author of The Secrets to Masterful Meetings provides insights to leaders on how to transform their meetings culture and how to eliminate bad meetings from their organization.
Topics
What is a Masterful Meeting?
A masterful meeting is a well-prepared, skillfully-executed, results-oriented meeting with a timely start, a decisive close, and a clear follow-up plan.
We all know when we have attended a masterful meeting: the purpose is clear, the right people are present, all the information needed is available, the agenda is carefully planned and executed, the discussion is passionate, people are engaged, decisions are made, and the meeting ends with a clear understanding of what was done and will be done next.
Unfortunately, most meetings aren’t masterful. Ask your people about the meetings they attend. You will likely find that many of them spend half or more of their time in unproductive, ineffective, dispiriting, and unnecessary meetings.
Bad meetings waste time, consume resources, and wear down people’s energy and passion. Still worse, bad meetings often result in bad decisions: decisions which are poorly thought through, void of innovation, and missing the necessary buy-in for success.
Unfortunately, we have lowered the bar so far that bad meetings have become the norm! We have accepted them as a necessary evil and, therefore, so have our people.
The result is an organizational culture that makes it acceptable to waste valuable time and resources in poorly prepared and poorly executed meetings.
Establishing Meeting Rights
A fundamental vehicle for transforming meetings is establishing and granting to every employee a set of meeting rights. The goal of the meeting rights is to empower everyone in the organization to be a catalyst for raising the bar on meetings and for making bad meetings unacceptable.
The Secrets to Masterful Meetings details ten meeting rights and recommends that organizations modify the rights to fit their desired culture. What follows is an abbreviated version of the ten rights.
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Your Meeting Rights(abbreviated) I. Meeting Notice. You have the right to be informed about the purpose, expected products, and proposed agenda for a meeting, verbally or in writing, at least twenty-four hours in advance of the meeting. II. Timely Start. You have the right to attend meetings that start on time. III. Right People. You have the right to have all major viewpoints critical to decision-making represented at the meeting. IV. Right Information. You have the right to have the information necessary to facilitate decision-making available at the meeting. V. Ground Rules. You have the right to have agreed upon ground rules respected in the meeting. VI. Focused Discussion. You have the right for meetings to stay focused on the topic of the meeting. VII. Input Opportunity. You have the right to have the opportunity to provide input and alternative views before decision-making occurs in the meeting. VIII. Meeting Recap. You have the right to hear a recap of (a) decisions made during the meeting, (b) actions to be taken, when and by whom, following the meeting, and (c) any outstanding issues to be discussed at a future meeting. IX. Timely Completion. You have the right to have your time respected by having meetings finish at or before the scheduled end time. X. No Retribution. You have the right to exercise Your Meeting Rights without fear of retribution or other consequences.
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This abbreviated version simply describes each right. The expanded version, however, describes both the right and the action the person is empowered to take if the right is violated. It is important that every organization defines empowered actions that fit its culture. Here is a sample of a meeting right and the empowered action adopted by one organization.
Your Meeting Rights(expanded)
I. Meeting Notice
You have the right to be informed about the purpose, expected products, and proposed agenda for a meeting, verbally or in writing, at least twenty-four hours in advance of the meeting. You have the right to decline to attend a meeting if your repeated request for this information is not honored without a reasonable cause, unless the meeting is an emergency session or a regular, ongoing meeting for which all attendees know the above information.
As you can imagine, we have had a wide variety of reactions to granting meeting rights. Here are just a few:
- “These meeting rights are pretty basic. They just detail common courtesy.”
- “It sounds like you are promoting an ‘entitlement’ mentality.”
- “You’re kidding, right? There is no way the leadership in our company would go for this.”
- “Sure, these rights could make us better. But how do we get people to take the risk and exercise them?”
What is especially interesting is that the second and third comments came from employees and the other two from leaders. Yet all agreed that meetings transformation is badly needed.
Six Keys to Transformation
Behavioral scientists tell us that the culture in an organization is the culture that is tolerated. If an organization has poor customer service, don’t blame the workers; blame the leaders for tolerating the culture. Likewise, if an organization has poor meetings, don’t blame the workers!
And when an organization wants to transform to a customer service culture, the path is simple, though not easy: gain buy-in on the need for change; declare the behaviors you want and why; provide training in those behaviors; communicate, recognize, and reward the behaviors; and hold people accountable when those behaviors are lacking.
And, oh yes, creating a customer service culture takes leadership: leaders who passionately believe in customer service, steadfastly support it, and strive to exhibit the behaviors themselves.
As with the customer service example, transforming the meetings culture of an organization requires leadership buy-in, a vision of something better, skill building around the behaviors, effective rewards, and accountability. The Secrets to Masterful Meetings provides a ten-step master plan for transforming meetings. The master plan is based on the following key success principles:
- Gain support from your Leadership Team before taking any action.
For the revolution to be successful, every member of your Leadership Team must understand that bad meetings are hurting the organization and that a focused effort is needed to bring about change. They must understand that their role as leaders in the organization is to ignite a fire within their direct reports and to have their direct reports ignite a fire in their direct reports, and so on.
- Establish a baseline to demonstrate the need for improvement.
Use a meeting survey to provide a baseline of the current state of meetings in the organization. The survey answers questions such as:
- How much time are we spending in meetings?
- What percentage of our meetings do we consider productive and effective?
- What are the common problems in our meetings?
- What are strategies we should consider for improving meetings?
- Overall, how satisfied are we with our meetings?
- Communicate a vision of what a masterful meetinglooks and feels like.
The vision defines how meetings in general should be planned, started, executed, and closed. It describes the role of meeting leaders and participants. It also provides good examples of ground rules, meeting notices, and meeting minutes.
- Empower every individual to actively participate in eliminating bad meetings.
By establishing meeting rights and encouraging people to exercise them, you put in place a mechanism for a grass-roots revolution that will serve as a driver for making bad meetings unacceptable.
- Provide vehicles for improving skills of meeting leaders and participants.
However, granting a provocative list of rights could result in anarchy if you don’t provide meeting leaders and meeting participants with the skills to honor those rights.
– For some, it will be sufficient to provide a meetings manual that includes best practices and a blueprint for preparing and running masterful meetings. The meetings manual should describe the role of meeting participants and meeting leaders, and also cover strategies for resolving conflict, addressing dysfunctional meeting behavior, and leading “virtual” meetings and other special meeting types.
– For most however, especially those who frequently lead meetings, a manual will likely not be sufficient. It will be more helpful for them to have training, along with practice and feedback opportunities, to allow them to build proficiency in running masterful meetings in a safe, classroom environment.
- Sustain momentum.
Sustaining a meetings transformation requires a focused effort on monitoring performance, communicating progress, rewarding successes, and taking corrective action when needed. Establish a small transformation team who takes responsibility for continuing to raise the bar on meetings.
Declare War on Bad Meetings!
The next time you find yourself saying, “This is an awful meeting,” remember that we get what we tolerate. Just look around the room and think about how much of your organization’s precious time and resources are being wasted every single business day.
When you have had enough, take action. You can begin raising the bar in a number of ways. Consider enlightening your leadership team by providing them information on masterful meetings. Consider developing and distributing a set of meeting rights and providing training in how to lead and participate in masterful meetings.
Declare war on bad meetings. Your organization will thank you for it!
Michael Wilkinson is the Managing Director of Leadership Strategies – The Facilitation Company and author of The Secrets to Masterful Meetings and The Secrets of Facilitation. He is a Certified Master Facilitator and a much sought after strategic planning facilitator and speaker.
