Meetings, Meetings, Meetings

Do you ever wonder where your time has gone? I don’t, I know where my time has gone! Most of it’s wasted in never ending meetings that rarely achieve anything except to establish the date and time of the follow-up meeting.

First there are weekly management meetings with massively long agendas that seek to resolve every problem the company has ever encountered, but actually cause more by setting impossible tasks and goals in impossible timeframes. However, these can go on all day and sometimes longer, although lunch is invariably supplied if you’re not too stressed to eat it.

Then there are the inter-departmental meetings, designed to progress the impossible tasks set at the management meetings. Nothing is ever achieved at these, as no one wants to be held accountable at the next management meeting!

Next come the ‘project’ meetings to plan and monitor the flavour-of-the-month projects and initiatives. First of all, someone is elected to take the blame and appointed project leader. Everyone has to take their turn at this unless you are a superb politician who can deflect all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. You can then pass this poison chalice to another unfortunate whilst being convincingly disappointed that you were unable to grasp this opportunity because of your root canal problem or acute alcoholism (brought on by weekly management meetings).

Then there are the scheduled ad hoc meetings (as opposed to the truly ad hoc meetings) which are planned to the very last detail and have the sole purpose of shifting the blame for something to someone other than the originator of the meeting. These work extremely well for the alcoholic shyster mentioned in the previous paragraph!

Finally, unless you know differently, are the truly ad hoc meetings. Generally engendered by a real and pressing issue that requires immediate resolution, these often work well and are arguably the only meetings worth having.

Here are some suggestions:

1. Have regular management meetings designed to inform and that set a strategy for problem solving rather than become a forum for allocating blame.

2. Start with a discussion about sales performance, which will generally draw-out the majority of opportunities and issues facing the business.

3. Have meetings with short agendas, but send clear and prompt minutes so everyone knows what was agreed.

4. Deal with problems one at a time rather than all at once.

5. Use truly ad hoc meetings sensibly and constructively and ban political ones.

6. Ensure that everyone is clear about their responsibilities, which will go a long way towards removing the inter-departmental rivalries.

7. Avoid a blame culture by welcoming new ideas and being open-minded and understanding that the occasional failure is acceptable and expected and serve to demonstrate that people are working outside of their comfort zone.

Without doubt, some meetings are necessary, but short meetings are always more effective than long ones. In a three-hour meeting you will get 70% done in the first hour, 30% in the second and nothing useful in the third - except lunch!