Death by Meeting

If we hate meetings, can we be making good decisions and successfully leading our organizations?

bad meetings almost always lead to bad decisions

We complain about, try to avoid, and long for the end of meetings, even when we’re running the darn things!

meetings are the closest thing to an operating room, a playing field, or a stage that we have.

Absolutely. I learned early in my career as a consultant that bad meetings at the executive level usually indicated a huge gap between performance and potential. And, Casey, your meetings were really horrible.”

And it should run like clockwork, lasting approximately sixty minutes, maybe less.” He paused before delivering the most controversial point of all. “And there is no agenda.”
Connor jumped in before Casey could. “What? Isn’t that going to make the meetings worse than they are now?”
“No. They’ll be exponentially better. Here’s why.” He paused for a moment before explaining. “These Weekly Tactical meetings will start with everyone giving a sixty-second report about what they’re working on that week.” At that point Will wrote Weekly Tactical on the board

Will spoke. “Okay, there are three important points I have to make here. First of all, this is the right conversation to be having. So you two,” he motioned at Matt and Michelle, “should not be feeling like you’re out of line.”
He let the point sink in as Matt and Michelle seemed to take a small measure of consolation from the reminder.
“Second, that discussion was definitely not boring.”
Everyone laughed, welcoming the humorous distraction.
“And third, we need to hear from everyone else.” Will scanned the room to emphasize his point.

But the point is, consensus is usually not achievable. The likelihood of six intelligent people coming to a sincere and complete agreement on a complex and important topic is very low.”

Will forged on. “It gets easier, I think, because the beginning is the hardest part. Once you’ve teed up the topic, then you just need to keep searching for conflict. When I was studying psychiatry, we used to call it mining.”
Casey was confused. “Mining?”
Will explained. “Everyone, but especially you, as the leader of the group, needs to be looking for places where people have different opinions but aren’t necessarily putting them out there. And when you see that, you need to force them to communicate what they’re thinking until they’ve said all there is to be said. You need to be constantly mining for buried conflict.”

Unbelievable. Will thought. At work we take longer than that to summarize just a week’s worth of business activity, and even then we never seem to resolve anything!