Read This Before Your Next Meeting
In save time, save the world, I wrote about time being the most valuable resource in the world. Too many companies spend their valuable time in endless meetings and rituals. According to Bain research, top companies spend 50% less time in meetings than the rest. According to this HBR article, collaboration overload is a result of deeper organizational problems.
Excess collaboration saps energy and leaves employees with too little time to complete their work during the day, forcing too many workers to spend time playing catch-up after hours and on weekends.
I am sure all of this resonates as we were all victims of poorly run meetings at some point in our life. While this line of thinking is correct; well-run meetings can drive effective decision making, and help build a great culture around shared values.
According to Steven Sinofsky, meetings are a critical tool for building a diverse, high-performance team with shared values. In this long but useful article, Steven identifies some of the most common dysfunctions and provides an antidote to avoid dysfunctional meetings. The below quote from Steven sums up what I consider is an outcome of a successful meeting.
The best meetings I remember are the ones where our team got a little closer and more connected and I remember that “feeling” more than I remember the specifics of what we talked about. — Steven Sinofsky
While Steven provides a measured approach to meetings, Elon Musk struck an idealistic tone in his recent note to his employees. The things that stood out are the following three nuggets:
Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time. Please get of all large meetings, unless you’re certain they are providing value to the whole audience, in which case keep them very short.
Also get rid of frequent meetings, unless you are dealing with an extremely urgent matter. Meeting frequency should drop rapidly once the urgent matter is resolved.
Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren’t adding value. It is not rude to leave, it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time.
The truth is generally somewhere in between Steven’s measured approach and Elon’s idealistic appraoch . Nevertheless, I have my takeaways from both.
- Good meetings can create strong cultures around shared values. At the same time, badly run meetings can damage the culture permanently.
- Frequent meetings rarely move the mission forward. Meeting effectiveness should be considered more important than meeting efficiency. Fewer, faster, and more focused meetings are more powerful and effective than frequent meetings.
- Meetings are not useful if only few people hold the court and not everyone’s voice is heard.
Finally, I do want to leave you with the below video nugget (starts at 1:04) from Satya Nadella where he talks about his personal principle for running meetings — Talk less, listen more, and act decisively!
Here are a few things I thought were worth sharing this week:
The 5 levels of Listening: Listening in general is very hard. Read this article to find out why. My favorite nugget: “If we do not understand their world view, we do not really understand them. If we do not understand them, we will never influence them.”
Netflix’s DVD business is still alive and profitable, by a small margin: This business is still around because streaming is still difficult in many parts of the country.
My article on customer obsession from last week in case you missed it.
