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We HAVE To Stop Meeting Like This!

Strategies for Transforming Your Meeting Culture

By Michael Wilkinson
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 run by someone else.  How many of these pitfalls were eviden

Didn’t start on time. Missing key people. Lacked a clear purpose. No agenda. Few people engaged.

Discussion wandered, repeatedly. Key issues weren’t addressed. No decisions made. No follow-up actions. The meeting wasn’t worth the time.

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.

Ignite a Revolution: Establish 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.

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.

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.

As you can imagine, we have had a wide variety of reactions to granting meeting rights.  Here are just a few:

• “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?”
• “These meeting rights are pretty basic.  They just detail common courtesy.”
• “It sounds like you are promoting an ‘entitlement’ mentality.”

What is especially interesting is that the second and third comments came from managers and the other two from employees.  Yet all agreed that meetings transformation is badly needed.

Five Tips for Making Your Next Meeting Masterful

How do you make your meetings masterful?  Here are five quick tips.

Be Prepared: The 5 Ps

What is the most important thing to do in meeting preparation? If you said, “Establish the agenda,” think again.  The agenda just answers the question, “What we are going to do (process)?”  More important than process is purpose and product.  To prepare for a masterful meeting, answer the 5 Ps.

• Purpose:  Why are we having this meeting?
• Product: What do we need to have when we are done?
• Participants: Who needs to be in the room to achieve the purpose and product?
• Probable Issues: What topics or concerns will we have to address?
• Process: What steps should we go through to achieve the purpose and create the product?

If you are not sure what your purpose and product are, or if you can achieve the purpose and product without a meeting, or if the purpose and product are not worth the time spent in meeting, don’t meet!

Engage from the Start: IEEI

At the beginning of a meeting, people typical want to know three things: “Why are we here?  What are we going to do? Will my issues be addressed?”  To have a masterful start, do the following:

• Inform the participants about the overall purpose of the meeting and the products that will result.
• Excite them by providing a vision of success and the benefitsto them.
• Empower them by identifying the authority they have been given, the important role they playin the process, or the reason they were selected for the meeting.
• Involve them in the first 15 minutes with a task-focused engagement question, such as What are the most important issues for us to address to achieve this purpose?

Manage Meeting Dysfunction

How do you deal with people arriving late, or working on their PDAs?  What do you do about the story teller, or the whisperer, or the constant topic jumper?  These are just five of 15 common dysfunctions that occur in meetings.  How do you address them?

• Conscious prevention:  Use ground rules and discussions in advance to prevent dysfunction.  For example, get agreement in advance on such ground rules as “One conversation, Only meeting work in the meeting, Start at the appointed time, Redirect off-topic discussions.”
• Early detection: Be on the lookout for dysfunction in the meeting.  Don’t ignore it.
• Clean resolution: Once detected, execute an appropriate resolution strategy.  While the specific strategy depends on the dysfunction, when it occurs, the number of people involved, etc., there is a general formula:
• Approach privately or generally.
• Empathize with the symptom.
• Address the root cause.
• Get agreement on the solution.

Implement a Decision Process: Resolving Disagreements

True or false: People disagree for only three reasons? True.  Masterful meeting leaders know the three reasons people disagree and have specific methods for reaching decisions.

• Lack of information. The people disagreeing have not clearly heard or understood each other’s alternatives and the reasons for supporting them. These disagreements are often a result of an assumed understanding of what the other person is saying or meaning. (Strategy: Delineate alternatives.)
• Different experiences or values. The parties have fully heard and understood one another’s alternatives. However, they have had different experiences or hold different values that result in them preferring one alternative over another.  (Strategy: Identify strengths and weaknesses and create new alternatives that combine strengths.)
• Outside factors.  The disagreement is based on personality, past history, or other outside factors that have nothing to do with the alternatives.  (Strategy: Take it to a higher source.)

Have a Masterful Close

Too many meetings end without a clear review of what was done or what is going to be done to implement the meeting decisions.  A masterful close includes the following:

• Review the items covered in the meeting.
• Confirm the decisions made.
• Address outstanding issues.
• Review future actions and ensure they have names and dates assigned.
• Thank participants, and end the meeting.
• Document and distribute meeting notes.
• Follow-up to hold people accountable to assigned actions.

Six Keys for Transforming Your Meeting Culture

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.

Leadership starts at the top.  If the leaders aren’t demonstrating a drive toward masterful meetings, employees get the point that this initiative isn’t important. For the revolution to be successful, every member of the Leadership Team must understand how 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.

Did you know that for a department of 20 people, just a 15% increase in the efficiency and effectiveness of meetings is equivalent in productivity to adding another person to the department?¹

• 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.

• q  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.

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