What outcome would make your next meeting so valuable that you wouldn’t want to miss it at any cost?
How about your co-workers? Do they feel that the outcome of your next meeting is so valuable that they wouldn’t want to miss it at any cost?
If yes, bravo! You’re a rare breed.
If not, what would make it so? What can you change to make it more valuable? (Maybe switch to a doing instead?)
Andy Miller, who after he’d sold his company to Apple reported directly to Steve Jobs, explains what it was like when he wasn’t paying attention for a brief moment. Jobs pulled him out:
“You weren’t paying attention. If I’ll ever notice that again, you’ll never again sit in one of these meetings.”
It sounds harsh but it makes sense when you turn it into a bidirectional deal: You must pay attention. But at the same time you get the right to demand that the content is worth paying attention to.
Essentially, as the leader you not only demand attention but you also demand to make good use of the attention, e.g. you guarantee everyone the right to point out when someone (including you) speaks a lot without saying much.
When you demand that everyone pays attention it means that there’s an incentive for everyone to prepare their material in a way that makes it worth paying attention to. (That’s, basically, how Amazon’s study hall approach to meetings works.)
A boring meeting is a great opportunity to catch up with unread mails. Sure.
But why not address the cause instead of the symptoms? Why not work to prevent boring meetings from happening rather than look for ways to re-use boring meeting time?
The best way is to turn it into a doing.
But if it absolutely has to be a meeting, here are a couple of ideas:
Don’t give in to boring meetings, change them.
(And it always starts with ourselves).
Meetings are corporate hell. Let’s switch to doings instead. What’s the difference?
Meetings have an agenda, doings have a goal.
Meetings are about conversations, doings about results.
In a meeting, we commit to what we want to do. In a doing we commit to what we do.
When a meeting is over, the work starts. When a doing is over, the work is done.
There is tremendous value in bringing people together in a room, on- or offline, and have them co-create solutions for our problems. Trouble starts when we stop short of creating something. When we meet just for the sake of it … because we always meet on that day … and it’s all words and no result.
When scheduling your next meeting, I suggest that rather than starting with “What will we talk about?” you start by asking “What will we do?”.
This is part 2 of the series on leaders who light the path – a group of extraordinary people doing work that matters. All of them have been pioneers in going through my new masterclass “Leaders Light the Path” which will open to the public this fall.
Jobien Hekking is the founder and CEO of Brainy Bunch. Brainy Bunch’s mission is to help organisations run online meetings that achieve much higher levels of effectiveness and which, at the same time, are much more enjoyable.
Yes, you’ve read that right. Enjoyable!
In this interview, we’re speaking about how that’s possible by tapping into the creativity and potential of every single participant in an online meeting in order to increase the level of energy and effectiveness of online meetings to unprecedented levels.
Jobien’s passion and energy to help organisations achieve this is infectious. She lives and breathes online meetings. Her level of expertise and dedication is unmatched by anyone else I know.
Read her fascinating story in the second interview of the “Leaders who light the path” series.
PS: If you’d like to boost your marketing just like Jobien did, I’d love you to consider joining the public launch of my masterclass this fall. Get more information here.
is not that we meet but how we meet. And that starts with why we meet.
Many meetings feel like a waste of time because they are.
When we meet e.g. to listen to info that could just as easily have been delivered as a memo, there’s no use for making the effort of putting everyone into the same room at the same time.
On the other hand, if we meet because there’s something that can’t be easily put in a mail. Or because the live interaction enables insights that would remain hidden otherwise. Or because we specifically make it about the human connections rather than the info …
So, if we meet because we actually make good use of the fact that humans are present in the same room at the same time, then this is a great reason to have a meeting.
And it shifts the “how” from a mere delivery of facts to actually making an effort to encourage and improve the human interactions. When the interactions are the reason why we meet, then the how becomes about the interaction.
“I’ve got more important business to do so I’ll cancel this meeting.”
Of course, you’ve got more important business to do. That’s out of the question. The real question is why did you agree to the meeting in the first place?
It’s easy to schedule a meeting when it’s a week or more away. It’s much more difficult to schedule a meeting that you actually want to attend when the day has come.
For me, the following question has proven to be a valuable tool: What would this meeting that I’m about to agree to need to provide so that I absolutely wouldn’t want to miss it? Make this specific before agreeing to the meeting. State it clearly and publicly.
Because if people would be ok to miss the meeting, then why should it be ok for the others to reserve the time just in case? If you feel that it will be ok to miss a meeting, you might just as well skip the meeting and schedule one that you wouldn’t want to miss, instead.
The very first meeting I participated in was a pure nightmare. We were 10 people. Exactly one was paying attention. Wanna know who? The one who was currently presenting. (And even that is up for debate.)
It was also the first day of my future career as a communication skills coach as I swore myself that I never wanted to experience meetings like this again. They are a huge waste of resources. They are a grave for great ideas. They kill creativity.
Back then, I believed in better. Today I know that better exists.
There is no way that it makes sense for 10 people to decide that the best use of their time would be to gather in a room with people who they have no intention of paying attention to.
What was the worst meeting experience you had?
Monday is status update day in many teams.
Sadly, the name has grown to carry a double meaning. Because too often it’s not only about the status of the project anymore but also about the status among the people in the team.
Too often, status updates are about “look how much I did last week”, or “look what I’m up to”, or “look, I’ve got everything under control”. In too many teams, the purpose of the status update meetings is rather to ensure that the boss sees how well people do than it is to actually discuss the actual project status.
How about a shift this week? What if rather than about status you made it about enabling? Instead of “What have you done to support the team?” you asked “What can the team do to support you?”
That way, the purpose of the meeting itself becomes to raise the status of each member as much as possible. It’s about making each member the best member they can be. A team member that creates better because we – as a team – enable her to do so.
Monday could be team enabling update once a while.
Meetings have a bad reputation as time wasters. That’s not going to magically improve when we transition to online meetings.
It’s even harder to coordinate who is speaking. It’s even harder to keep track of progress because everything we write down has to fit onto a small screen. No flip charts, whiteboards or other media that you can all maintain simultaneously in a face-to-face setting in order to visualise what’s being said.
At the same time, it’s much easier to get distracted while sitting in your home office. If it’s not your turn, if what’s being said is boring or repetitive, your mind is much more likely to be attracted by things lying on your desk than it would be in a face-to-face meeting.
Keeping the number of participants small has been a great way to increase the efficiency of many meetings before. It’s even more valuable online. In a small group, It’s easier to organise whose turn it is, it’s harder to tune out and it’s much easier to focus on a goal as fewer egos have to be balanced.
On the other hand, a big advantage of online meetings is the ability to record it. There is no need for attending a meeting “just to be in the loop”. You can always watch the recording later.
