At my former agency we used to tell our staff that they should never attend a meeting where they don’t have something to contribute. Or the reverse, if they were in a meeting they should find a meaningful way to contribute. As consultants, our clients were prone to wonder why they are paying non-contributors to be on a project, or why their meetings were padded with people they thought to be non-essential.

Can you imagine writing a check to pay for all the attendees of your meetings? This is why agency meetings are so lean, and why they’re focused on outcomes, not discussions.

Now that I’ve left consulting, and I run a design team internally at a large organization, I wonder sometimes in meetings what those silent meeting goers are thinking because I believe that if attendees spoke up the outcome of the meeting would be better.

Meeting ≠ Doing

First, there is the I was invited so I came, but I’m going to work on other stuff meeting goer. I don’t believe this is apathy, I believe it’s bad planning. It is a symptom of this: The, I’m not sure what to do so I invited a bunch of the right people to a meeting, meeting mindset. If you set a meeting, the work will get done. The problem is meeting is not doing.

Meetings should focus on outcomes: decisions, concise sets of actions, and success criteria.

Finally

If you’re the type to just call a meeting, how about working with a couple key people beforehand to outline the decisions and outcomes you need to proceed? The beauty of a plan is when you tell people why you’re calling a meeting they will know why they are needed, and they might just keep their laptop closed.

And if I’m in your meeting with my laptop open it probably means I’m in the downward spiral of a dying meeting and I need your help to know how I can contribute.