#367: This meeting could have been an email
If yesterday's meetings were all summarized in emails, how much time would you have saved? What would have been lost?
Parts of this blog were excerpted from an original article in Wall Street Journal, January 6, 2022: By Kathryn Dill
It’s Monday morning, time for those dreaded status update meetings. “Regularly convening 40 employees to have each one spell out what they’re working on, and listen to 39 others do the same, is not a productive use of time.”
Meetings should have a very clear purpose
Ask yourself: What do you want to achieve in this meeting? To GET info or to SHARE info? There are four basic types of meetings that managers should convene, if your objective is not on this list, it is a good indication of wasting time.
Learning meetings generate knowledge.
Innovation meetings generate ideas.
Commitment meetings generate decisions.
Alignment meetings generate a road map.
Are you training, brainstorming, negotiating, managing? If you feel that everyone needs to hear everything, please check this list again.
Below are just a few types of meetings and quick suggestions on how to make them more productive:
Sales Meetings
Instead of having everyone talk about every customer, have them share a success story. Those stories need takeaways that can be applied by others. Is there a new way to use your product? Is there a new segment of customers?
Make it a requirement that the success story needs a why defined. What did the sales person do differently? Maybe they used a new tool like Chat GPT to help write a proposal, or they tried a new closing line that worked. What learning opportunity for the rest of the team is in the story? Again, look for those take-aways.
Engineering Meetings
Are you creating a roadmap? or are you simply making sure the project is on time? If no-one is asking for help or additional resources, you are most likely not utilizing time well. Meetings with these types of individuals need to be collaborative for them to be engaged. Otherwise they will catch up on their email during Joe’s presentation.
As mentioned for the sales team, what new tools have been used to help the team? Where are they getting their newest information about the industry? When you have this much brainpower in a meeting, you want to fuel it, not suck it dry.
Operational Meetings
Getting commitments from logistics, or manufacturing personnel? Or are you just reporting that 97% of your packages were shipped on time? If you are not diving into the 3% that weren’t, you are wasting time. Again, ask for input from others, break into groups to come up with an action plan, and next meeting find out how that action plan worked? Did you reduce the 3% to 1.5%?
Have there been any new advancements in productivity tools or software that the team used? Try a mastermind session digging deep into the issue of getting that delivery rate to 99%. Find out what has been done, and what else can be tried. Use these minds, and take note of the free-thinkers and the ones with the biggest imaginations. They are your future leaders.
Management Meetings
This is where the rubber meets the road. Do you spend time solving other problems? Or patting each other on the back? Are you offering solutions or excuses?
Are you tracking goals and objectives? I am a huge believer in quantifying EVERYTHING. Management team meetings should spend 10-minutes reviewing where they are on their quantifiable goals. Use your weekly meetings to get a snapshot of your weekly goals. If they are green move on, if they are red more than two or three weeks in a row, put them aside and dive into them in the “Issues” section of the meeting.
In today’s environment of hybrid working, it is very easy to see how interested others are in your meeting. Either they have their camera on, or off. They can mute themselves so you don’t hear them searching LinkedIn for a new job that is more interesting than these meetings. They turn their cameras off so you can’t read their body language.
As a manager, leader, owner of a business, it’s up to you to take control of these meetings. Make them beneficial. Ask what everyone took away from the meeting as they walk out the door. Time is money, don’t waste it. If you are not having a meeting that has one of those four factors above, cancel it.
At the Kole Performance Group, we can help you manage your calendar and help your meetings to be more productive so you can improve your tomorrow! Take a look at my calendar, and let’s set up a 30-minute meeting to see how we can work together.