Managing meetings

Objective

Meetings are the primary way you communicate with your team members and they therefore play a critical role in:

• communicating strategy and goals;
• demonstrating principles and values;
• disseminating information;
• establishing personal relationships;
• determining the manner and mode of decision-making.

The effective leader understands that meetings are always about more than the subject of the meeting itself.

Plan your approach to all meetings for both the immediate (subject) and the underlying (leadership) agendas.

Context

In managing meetings, as in much else, you, the leader, set the tone. For example, if you work on a schedule of back-to-back meetings which become the main forums for decision-making then you set a tone of bureaucracy, stifling process and corporatism rather than individualism – and worst of all a culture in which decision-making is collective and not independent. In turn, this may then create a culture of dependency on you – nothing of significance happens to which you are not a party (in a meeting).

You must also learn how to manage your time – not simply to fit everything in, but to ensure that you are allowing time for the right things. Meetings become a crucial instrument in this art of time management, since you have within your control the number and duration of meetings you run, and the number of others’ meetings you choose to attend.

Challenge

Meetings present a leadership paradox – you will subscribe to the principle that communication is an essential lubricant for the machinery of business, but will also know that meetings are the bane of corporate existence for many in your team.

• How often do you meet people who complain that their business lives are dominated by meetings?
• How often do you make calls only to receive the message that so-and-so ‘is in a meeting’ and feel frustrated?
• How often do you look at your own diary with the sinking feeling that at very best you will squeeze in the work you need to do between meetings?
• How often do you sit in meetings and feel that you should be elsewhere, that the meetings are overlong and poorly chaired?
• How often do you attend meetings whose outcome is either indecision or yet another long sequence of action points that will never be completed?

If you are successful you will be seen to be using meetings as a major instrument of communication, which staff welcome for their candour and effectiveness rather than resent for their?irrelevance and time-wasting.

Success

Taking a stance on meetings is a central part of the stance you must take on corporate culture, entrepreneurship, decision-making and people development. It is part of the humility you need to cultivate – your role as leader is to create an environment in which great things happen, not in which you do all the great things. So have a clear meeting structure.

• Regular staff meetings – with all staff (face-to-face or via electronic media) setting out repeatedly a set of core strategic and operational messages. One lesson you will soon learn is that no messages are received or learned if they are not repeated (and thus given credibility). These meetings and messages set an overall context for actions.
• Senior team meetings – regular issues-based meetings with your senior team focusing on core strategic and operational issues, but no more than once a week.
• Awaydays – regular ‘retreat’ meetings with your senior team to create social bonds and to allow space for out-of-the-box thinking away from operational and day-to-day matters.
• 121s – use regular one-to-one meetings with direct reports focusing on specific issues and progress made against objectives.
• Non-meeting time – where possible (apart from governance-related meetings, perhaps) you should have few other fixed meetings, if any. You focus your ‘floating’ diary time to be spent with current and potential partners, suppliers and, most of all, customers – or even just to be alone. This is when you do your most productive thinking about the future.
• Agendas – all meetings have clear agendas, timetables and monitored action items.

You must make it clear in what kinds of issues you expect to be involved – these will vary not only with the type of business, but also the stage of the development and business cycle the organisation is in. You should:

• explain how decisions on such issues are to be made;
• stress to your direct reports that they are accountable for decision-making within their own teams, and that you would prefer your involvement to be limited to second-line assistance in problem-solving – when you start attending your direct reports’ meetings, you undermine their leadership and accountability;
• encourage all your direct reports to take a similar attitude so that, within clearly set limits, staff are empowered to make decisions and that meetings are best used to solve problems.

This is a discipline that is liberating, though it requires determination to implement. It frees up time, it focuses on issues, it takes responsibility for communication away from meetings per se, and will contribute to unleashing a positive wave of empowered, delegated, action-orientated responsibility.

Pitfalls

You have a golden opportunity in meetings that you chair to set an example. Equally you display the sloppiest of practices if you allow any or all of the following:

• meetings are not timetabled, but often held ad hoc;
• attendees are not strictly limited to those who can contribute but open to all-comers;
• meetings start late;
• meetings have no stated length that is adhered to, or have a given length that is rarely observed;
• discussion is unfocused and wanders from the issue at hand;
• actions are not noted, circulated and scheduled for follow-up.

It is important not to allow your organisation or team to become one in which the most frequent activity – meetings – is the least disciplined.

Leaders’ checklist

• From the day you assume the leadership role, do not accept an inherited meetings structure. Focus on communicating directly to large numbers of people face-to-face whenever you can, and keep as much time as possible free for customers and thinking.
• Be persistent in advising your direct reports that you do not make decisions for them and expect them to be involved in problem-solving. Exhort them to create within their own teams a culture that decision-making is delegated and not centralised.
• Be dogged in the way you chair meetings (see above) to ensure that you establish a culture in which meetings have a purpose and are not an end in themselves.
• Refuse to attend meetings which you think are not for you, making it clear why you are doing so.
• Always try to ‘be seen’, and subtly take a ‘meetings health-check’. Observe how many there are and how many people are attending them.