Economist Thomas Sowell jokes, “The least productive people are usually the ones who are most in favor of holding meetings.” And sometimes those unproductive people are the highest paid! Have you ever been in a session where people are covertly tallying up the amount of salary in the room? In organizations today, this is the current state of meetings.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
There is still value in bringing together employees and leaders and building shared understanding and support for the work ahead. And in order for those sessions to not be a waste of time and investment, design is critical. Most of us agree that successful meetings begin with a well-designed agenda, but productive meetings need more attention than that. Successful meetings require design before, during, and after you gather together. In our experience, both within our firm and with our clients, here are four things all meetings need to ensure productivity and impact.
The 4 “C’s” of Well Designed Meetings
1) Context
where we often find meetings go astray is that there is more thinking and planning about the venue and whether lunch will be served, than there is about the context of the meeting. What current events are impacting the general morale and subconscious of our workforce at this point in time? Will we use this meeting as a general update, decision-making mechanism, or a launch of greater change? And ultimately, why are we making the investment of time and money to gather people? Context is defined as the interrelated conditions in which something exists or occurs. It’s critical that you understand your meeting exists in a larger organizational world and therefore the connections to that world have to be painfully acknowledged and nursed to ensure your audience participates and takes from the meeting the things you intend.
2) Content
have you ever gone to a three-day session, returned to your desks and then felt unsure of what you learned, gathered, or gained from that big investment of time. The “faux content” meetings which bring together a set of employees or leaders and stich together an unrelated set of 30 minute presentations all in the name of an “annual meeting” or “fiscal year kick-off” end up doing more damage than good. The intent may be noble – to bring together our workforce in the name of sharing and learning – but without real content and the appropriate time and mechanisms to digest and metabolize, it can be detrimental to relationships, credibility, and performance. There is nothing more likely to discourage talent in your organization than wasting their time. So, whether the meeting is 5 minutes or 5 days, make sure to have content that matters to the people there.
3) Congruency
Even when understanding the context and being purposeful on the content, a meeting can fall short when the two are not done in tandem. Often one set of leaders or meeting designers does a great job on the context for a session, then leaves the actual content to another well-intentioned set of people to design. Imagine the meeting designed to introduce a new externally hired CEO, her vision for the company and allow her to build relationships with those who she will depend on to help dramatically change performance. Imagine that same meeting with an agenda that focuses on prior year earnings, this year’s financial targets, an incentive plan revamp and compliance training. Not very inspirational is it? Ensuing congruency between context and content will allow for intended impact to be reached. Warren Buffet famously scheduled his meetings one day in advance. Why? Because he wanted to make sure that the content of his conversations best fit the context of his business. While scheduling one day in advance may sound like insanity, his practice remains a helpful reminder of the principle of connecting context with content.
4) Continuity
Quite often the end is in site when the agenda has “closing remarks” scheduled. But if we truly understand a meeting to be just one gathering in a process of alignment, education, engagement, or decision-making, then we can focus not only on what happens during the session, but more importantly what happens next. It is rare that real work actually happens “in” a meeting. Meetings are a good mechanisms for creating shared voice and vision but addressing critical issues usually happens in the follow-up. Having a detailed plan of attack for what happens afterwards is a critical as the upfront planning to pull it off.
Perhaps Thomas Sowell is correct and that most of our meetings are not productive. Don’t have those meetings. If you feel like your time would be better spent other than in your next meeting, cancel it now, and spend that time where you can have the most impact. The truth is that if we take the above four things to heart, not only will we have more productive meetings, but we will likely have less meetings. And I think we all agree that could be a good thing.
Learn more: