Transforming Your Meetings Culture: Establish Meeting Rights!
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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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; it is the culture that leadership tolerates. 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: 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, it takes leadership: leaders who passionately believe in customer service, steadfastly support it, and strive to exhibit the behaviors themselves.
Meetings Transformation
So how do leaders transform the meetings culture inside their organization? In my recently released book, The Secrets to Masterful Meetings, I dedicate a chapter to meetings transformation and provide detailed strategies based on seven key principles. Here’s a brief summary:
1. Gain support from your Leadership Team before taking any action.
2. Establish a baseline to demonstrate the need for improvement and to provide the starting point for determining if improvement occurs.
3. Communicate a vision of what a Masterful Meeting looks and feels like and what role meeting leaders and participants play in creating it.
4. Empower every individual to actively participate in eliminating bad meetings.
5. Provide vehicles for improving skills of meeting leaders and participants.
6. Monitor and communicate progress and take corrective action as needed.
7. Reward successes.
Meeting Rights
A key component of the transformation plan is establishing a set of Meeting Rights and granting those rights to every employee. Shouldn’t everyone have the right for meetings to start on-time? And the right to know the purpose and proposed agenda for the meeting in advance? And the right for the meeting to stay focused on that purpose?
In the book, I describe ten meeting rights and recommend that organizations modify them to fit their desired culture. The purpose of the meeting rights is to empower every individual in the organization to be a catalyst for raising the standard for meetings and for making bad meetings unacceptable.
In phrasing each right, I intentionally describe a minimal target and the action a person has the right to take if the minimal target is not achieved. Here’s an example:
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 perhaps imagine, we have had a number of different reactions to the sample 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 our employees to take the risk and exercise them?”
What was especially interesting to me was that the second and third comments came from employees and the other two from leaders. Yet all agreed that meetings transformation was badly needed.
The next time you find yourself saying, “That was an awful meeting,” remember that we get what we tolerate and consider steps for transformation.
You can learn more about masterful meetings – the book and our training classes – at www.masterfulmeetings.com.
Michael Wilkinson is the Managing Director of Leadership Strategies – The Facilitation Company and author of The Secrets of Facilitation and The Secrets to Masterful Meetings. He is a Certified Master Facilitator and a much sought after strategic planning facilitator and speaker.
