Good Meetings and Bad Meetings No Small Issue
Sept. 22, 2006 — The curse of bad meetings spreads like a toxic blanket, covering all continents and the public, private and nonprofit sectors. In France, experts spend hours in discussion about whether something that works perfectly in practice can make sense in theory. In Ukraine, aging managers drone on endlessly about the not-so-bad old days while their colleagues sit comatose. In faculty meetings everywhere, teachers and professors pontificate while their peers scribble notes that reveal deeply homicidal thoughts. In the Virgin Islands, meetings seem to be so bad that people dont show up, and sessions are often cancelled for lack of a quorum.
Arent bad meetings just a part of life? Whats the big deal? In many places, people are so accustomed to bad meetings that they take them for granted and assume that nothing can or will be done about making them better. In his recent book, "Death By Meeting," Patrick Lencioni goes beyond descriptions of the problem to make a critical point: the cost of bad meetings is far higher than almost anyone realizes. At the outer edges, these costs include lost jobs and organizational or business failure. Bad meetings are a big deal, and they are often both a cause and a symptom of bigger organizational problems.
Bad meetings are like bad movies. Most of them are not bad enough to be good or to trigger corrective action. There used to be a cable television program called Mystery Science Theatre. It showed the worst movies in the history of the world, movies in which the monster wore a gorilla suit and a diving helmet because somebody had misplaced the gorilla head, or in which a pilot could fly a single-engine plane nonstop from China to Africa to rescue the blond girl who had become the queen of a tribe. Every so often a meeting will rise to this level of badness. People will yell at each other or stomp out in disgust. Someone will tell a long-winded speaker to sit down and be quiet. People will cry. These are the great and memorable moments, but they are the exceptions. Most bad meetings are just boring and unproductive. Over time these meetings tend to just die away, one cancellation leading to another, and then they just stop and everyone is relieved. The problem is that nothing has replaced them as a vehicle for whatever they were designed to achieve.
Why are meetings often bad? Why and how tend to overlap here, but it is worth separating them. In my experience, the most important reasons for bad meetings are:
The responsible manager does not give the meeting sufficient (or any) thought. There is little preparation: what are we trying to accomplish? What should the agenda be? How do I make this interesting and engaging? What other tools do I need for this meeting? How do I get buy-in? Managers under stress are particularly vulnerable to this problem, but there are also those who simply do not think like managers.
Roles are not clearly defined. Who exactly is in charge of this meeting? What is expected of the participants? What are the ground rules for participation? These are not complicated questions, but they are typically ignored by managers who do not think of the meeting as an important and expensive management tool. On many occasions, I have sat in useless meetings and done the math (# of people x per-hour salary rate x hours in the meeting) to calculate the direct dollar cost of this waste of time.
Bad meetings especially those that are habitual are often signs of an organization in distress. These meetings continue and are tolerated because of some underlying sense of pessimism on the part of the participants. They can be indicators of a top-down, Im the boss or a blaming culture in which active participation is seen as a risk. Bad meetings and a lack of trust and commitment among the participants go hand in hand. They can also be signs of indifference and a lack of commitment to achieving results. Good meetings wont solve these problems, but solving these problems will almost certainly produce better meetings.
Bad meetings and conflict avoidance are also handmaidens. Are boring meetings always bad? Yes. Are contentious meetings bad? No. Meetings are the place for differences to be thrashed out and the best solutions identified. If one is searching for signs of a healthy organization, spirited discussions, even arguments, about substantive issues are about as good an indicator as you will find. Meetings are frequently boring because there is no constructive conflict. The boss or manager who is looking for yeses and good news will certainly get them, but in the long term, there will be a stiff price to be paid.
How are meetings bad? Let me count the ways. Here is a checklist for assessment of meeting quality. These are some of the most important ways in which meetings are boring and unproductive:
People do not know why they are there. What is this meeting about? What is my role? This usually means that the agenda if there is one has not been communicated and the makeup of the group has not been clearly thought out. How often have we sat in a meeting and thought, God, what am I doing here?
There is no clear focus. This lack of focus usually takes one or more of three forms, all of which can be tied to lack of preparation on the part of the responsible manager. First, the agenda wasnt clear to start with. This happens a lot with regularly scheduled meetings that have either lost their purpose or never had one. Second, the leader, usually with the active complicity of the participants, allows the meeting to drift off into ancillary or unrelated issues, typically the pet grievance of an individual or small group. The parking lot, i.e., flagging the issue and committing to dealing with it later, is an invaluable tool for dealing with this problem. Finally, the desired outcome of the meeting is never defined so that there is no cohesion, no glue. It is never clear what people are supposed to be working toward.
Ambiguity rules. Issues are not clearly defined. Choices are not discussed in any structured way. It is not certain whether there was a decision or not. And at the end, people leave without knowing what they are supposed to do. There are no outcomes. In the movie "Back to School," Rodney Dangerfield, the head of a chaotic company, says to his secretary, Hold some of my calls. That remark captures the essence of the ambiguous meeting. What does it mean? Which ones?
There is no ownership. People sit in the meeting and act as if the issues that they are discussing belong to someone else. Even their body language says, Dont expect me to do anything about this. Not challenged, this behavior becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Bad formats and wrong tools. Meetings have a variety of purposes, and the formats and tools that are used should be matched to the purpose. My experience is that meetings are used too frequently for purely informational purposes, there are too many long presentations and speeches, and that the use of Power Point should be sharply curtailed as a tool.
No learning takes place. Learning organizations do better than non-learning ones. Meetings can and should be vehicles for learning. Non-learning and boredom go hand in hand.
What can we do? Improving meeting quality can have a significant positive effect on organizational life. This is not a great secret. Google has 85 million citations for better meetings. There are a lot of good ideas. Here are some basic ones:
Start by acknowledging, understanding and clearly defining the sources and outcomes of the problem. Do we have good and productive meetings? If the answer is no, what do we think the reasons are, and what happens because we have bad meetings? What do we want to be different?
Think about purposes. There should be different meetings and different formats to achieve different goals. Patrick Lencionis approach is hierarchical: five-minute daily check in just to make sure everyone is on the same page about today; a weekly meeting to review this week and clarify wh
at we want to accomplish next week, as well as any emerging issues; a monthly meeting to look at broader strategic issues, and an off-site retreat. These purposes should not be mixed. My experience is that the weekly lookingback/looking-forward meeting is particularly effective because the agenda is so clear-cut. Basic rule: dont have meetings for the sake of having a meeting. There has to be a purpose.
Maintain focus. Stick to the agenda. Use the parking lot for issues not on the agenda, but dont turn it into a memory hole. Get back to these issues or the pressure for digressions will increase over time.
Understand who is running the meeting. This person is responsible for the most important functions: presenting and getting through the agenda; maintaining focus; clarifying and summarizing decisions and key points.
Have the right people in the room. With everyone in the room, decisions are decisions. Without them, there is invariably pressure to backtrack and reopen issues that have been decided. These pressures should be resisted. They are the path to inaction.
Focus on ownership. Get buy-in so that implementation of decisions is a logical outcome rather than something akin to house-to-house combat.
Use some basic ground rules. In my experience, the most useful are: (1) start and end on time; (2) no side conversations, one person speaking at any time; (3) dont suppress conflict and the expression of differences; (4) maintain the parking lot, and (5) make participation a condition of being in the meeting and not an option.
A final note: If anyone doubts the importance of meeting quality, reading "Death by Meeting" will clear up this misconception. Like all of Lencionis work, it focuses on real-life issues and also helps us see that organizations face a common set of problems and challenges. We are not alone in this messy world.
Editor's note: Dr. Frank Schneiger is the president of Human Services Management Institute, Inc., a 25-year-old management consulting firm that focuses on organizational change. Much of his current work is in the area of problems of execution and implementing rapid changes as responses to operational problems.
