Avoiding Death by Meeting - Part II

Meetings should never be viewed as a “necessary evil” or as “off-line” time. As long as people need to collaborate, meetings will always play a central role in our work lives. Accordingly, leaders should strive to transform them into creative, interactive and productive forums for exchanging information, processing ideas, making decisions and mobilizing action.

Last week, I shared five suggestions for making your meetings more purposeful, relevant and engaging. Here are five more ideas for improving how you use your meeting time.

1. Structure your meetings based on a core purpose. Try to avoid the all purpose – all hands on deck staff meetings where everything from strategy to tactics and administrivia to cultural change are discussed. In addition to Daily Check-in meetings (discussed last week), Patrick Lencioni suggests that you hold Weekly Tactical meetings, Monthly Strategic meetings, and Quarterly Off-Site meetings. Each type of meeting will have its own unique format, process and flow. This may seem excessive, but meetings with a purpose-driven structure will actually result in better efficiency, focus and outcomes.
2. Establish basic ground rules for your meetings. Ideally, your ground rules should address behavioral aspects (e.g., mutual respect, attentiveness) and process elements (e.g., decision-making method and discussion parameters). Keep your ground rules posted and revisit them on a regular basis. Also, include them in your meeting evaluations (see #5 below). 
3. Encourage and promote meaningful dialogue, and be ready to manage the conflict that will naturally emerge when important issues are on the table. Meaningful dialogue is possible only when respect is balanced with honesty. In other words, people must demonstrate genuine consideration for one another while at the same time speaking their minds. Dialogue is choked off when people filter their thoughts, ideas and feelings, or, alternatively, when they try to force them on others. True dialogue – on issues that really matter to people – will spark emotion and create friction. The key is not to suppress or intensify the heat but simply to use it. When managed skillfully, healthy conflict will keep people engaged, expand the quantity and quality of information and options, and lead to better decisions.
4. Document your team decisions and reinforce the disciplines of follow-up and follow-through with all meeting participants. Meetings are not ends in themselves; they need to result in post-meeting action of some kind where individuals act on specific commitments. Follow-up is the action an individual takes to clarify or obtain information that will help improve decision-making. Follow-through is the action an individual takes to implement or activate decisions. It is a good idea to have people verbally confirm their commitments to one another during team meetings.  
5. Leave 5-10 minutes to evaluate the effectiveness of each meeting. You need to assess the process and outcomes of your meetings more than the content. In other words, discuss how well the meeting time was used, not so much what was discussed. It is easy to adjust content. The most effective teams learn how to critically evaluate and continually perfect the quality of their meetings.

Instead of inflicting a slow and agonizing death by meeting, leaders should strive to create the type of meetings that people are dying to attend. I realize that this is a very high bar, but this is true of all worthwhile challenges.