How To Ensure Your Meetings Aren't A Waste of Time
Nothing is worse than joining a meeting filled with update monologues. This is a better way to make meetings engaging and productive.
When I join an executive meeting or board meeting, I often know right away if it’ll be productive. If I receive an agenda that previews a series of departmental and team update monologues, I know that we are about to waste a lot of valuable time.
Update meetings are regularly given with lengthy PowerPoint decks, with a small group of leaders or department heads reading bullet points off slides as everyone follows along. Once the PowerPoint ends—and after speakers have gone over their allotted times—there is barely any time for discussion that yields a decision or a next step.
When you step back from these meetings, you'll see that highly valuable time from several people was coordinated for a session where information could have been shared asynchronously. An hour of monologues with only a few minutes of discussion doesn't justify a meeting.
After enduring these types of meetings for years, I started making a consistent effort to eliminate them wherever I could, including at our company and in the nonprofit boards I was on. The results were immediately positive—before long, update meetings were replaced with dialogue-driven, action-oriented discussions.
It’s understandable that leaders default to update meetings as a standard process. People like to know what’s going on across a company, and simple updates can fill a meeting agenda without making anyone do too much work.
But while update meetings are easy, they are wasteful of valuable time and attention. There’s a much better alternative that I’d encourage any leader to try in their team or organization.
Share updates before the meeting
Everyone has been in a meeting that could have been an email. For all but the most high-leverage company updates, such as the launch of a new product, or an acquisition, updates can be written in advance. They can be circulated in an email, published as a memo or added to a shared document.
Ideally, these written updates or memos should set up discussion topics for the meeting itself. For example, rather than sharing bad financial results in a meeting, a finance leader should share those details in advance and provide the framing necessary for a discussion of how to fix the problem. For a few examples of effective memos, review the three examples we’ve used at our company including at the end of this post.
This memo-driven approach has a few significant benefits.
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