Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean.

—RYUNOSUKE SATORO

Meetings are a fact of life and an essential part of doing business and collaborating in the corporate arena. When they are run effectively, meetings can foster relationships, solve problems, and develop stronger teams. Meetings, both good ones and bad, can actually affect the level of an employee's happiness. One study out of the University of North Carolina showed that the feelings a worker had about the meetings they attended at their company had a direct correlation to the general satisfaction or dissatisfaction they felt about their job.¹ Those working in the corporate arena are attending more and more meetings. Research shows that meetings have increased in length and frequency over the past 50 years, with executives now spending an average of nearly 23 hours a week in them, up from less than 10 hours in the 1960s.² And because so many of the meetings people attend are poorly run or unnecessary, they often end up undermining effective communication and collaboration instead of improving them.

One survey from Microsoft found that 69 percent of people worldwide (and 71 percent in United States) felt that the meetings at their company were ineffective.³ Common complaints included: the timing or location of the meeting changing at the last minute, people arriving late or being unprepared, side conversations that distract from the agenda, and action items not being developed. While meetings have a bad rap with people, it is generally the operation of the meeting that elicits negative feelings, not the vehicle of the meeting. It's not that we object to the meeting itself, it is the frequent disorganization we encounter that makes us feel as if our time is being wasted. In truth, meetings can be very valuable experiences if they are facilitated properly. “Meetings matter because that's where an organization's culture perpetuates itself,” says William R. Daniels, a senior consultant who has done extensive research on the subject. “Meetings are how an organization says, ‘You are a member,’ so if every day we go to boring meetings full of boring people, then we can't help but think that this is a boring company. Bad meetings are a source of negative messages about our company and ourselves.”⁴ We hate mandatory meetings that go on too long, lack focus, and don't accomplish their objective. An effective facilitator's job is to create value for meeting attendees by guiding them to a successful outcome while utilizing each person's talent and, at the same time, honoring their time.

A meeting is a formal or informal gathering of people for the sole purpose of achieving a common goal through the sharing of information or debating of issues. Meetings can take place in person, over the phone or via video conferencing. According to a recent study, around 25 million meetings are conducted each day in the United States alone—around 3 billion meetings per year.⁵ A 2014 article in the Harvard Business Review found that senior executives devote more than two full days every week to meetings involving three or more coworkers and 15 percent of an organization's time is spent in meetings—a percentage that has gradually increased every year since 2008.⁶ The bad news is that much of this time spent in meetings is unproductive. Studies have found that more than half of senior leaders surveyed rated the meetings they attended at their company as “ineffective” or “very ineffective.”⁷ And the price of these poorly run meetings is steep, costing U.S. companies around $37 billion a year.⁸ Ineffective meetings are not only a waste of time and resources, they also contribute to “productivity drain” for a team or organization. Humorist Dave Barry once wrote, “If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve its full potential, that word would be ‘meetings.’ ”⁹ In this chapter, we will detail ways to plan and execute a meeting that honors people's time and gets results. While cultural norms for meetings vary among industries and countries, having a specific meeting process in place will enable an organization to accomplish its goals in a more positive and collaborative way.

Value is not intrinsic, it is not in things. It is within us; it is the way in which a man reacts to the conditions of his environment . . . how they act.

—LUDWIG VON MISES

Every leader has different philosophies about how meetings should be run. For example, if you work for Amazon, it is helpful to be comfortable with conflict.¹⁰ CEO Jeff Bezos encourages his meeting attendees to respectfully challenge any decision being made, no matter how difficult or exhausting it may be to do so. Bezos doesn't believe in compromising or agreeing for the sake of social cohesion. But when a decision is eventually made, he expects the entire organization to get behind it and offer their support. Bezos is not a fan of PowerPoint presentations and instead encourages his employees to submit their ideas in the form of four-to-six page memos. In the opening minutes of an Amazon meeting, Bezos and his team conduct what he calls “silent starts”—where everyone in attendance simply reads through the memos in silence. “For new employees, it's a strange initial experience,” says Bezos. “They're just not accustomed to sitting silently in a room and doing study hall with a bunch of executives.”¹¹ For Bezos, these silent starts serve a dual purpose: they assure undivided attention and help prepare all meeting attendees for the discussion that will follow. And when it comes to meeting size, Bezos believes that the more people who attend a meeting, the less will get accomplished. Because of this, he has implemented what he calls the “Two Pizza Rule” at Amazon, meaning no meeting should ever take place where two pizzas couldn't feed the entire group.¹²

Steve Jobs, known to prefer simplicity and minimalism in the design of his products, also liked these qualities in his meetings at Apple. He hated when meetings were overattended, believing that too many minds in the room complicated the decision-making process. Once, when Jobs was in a weekly meeting with Apple's ad agency, he saw someone in the room who didn't regularly attend, and politely asked her to leave, saying, “I don't think we need you in this meeting.”¹³

Employees of Elon Musk, the visionary founder of Tesla and SpaceX, learned quickly that they needed to have a clear grasp of the topics included on a meeting agenda. Said one SpaceX employee, “When we met with Elon, we were prepared. Because if you weren't, he'd let you know it. If he asked a reasonable follow-up question and you weren't prepared with an answer, well, good luck.”¹⁴ During one meeting at SpaceX, Musk noticed a female attendee who had not contributed any ideas or opinions. “You haven't said anything,” remarked Musk, confronting her in front of the entire group. “Why are you in here?”¹⁵ Though this exchange may have been seen as rude, it also made Musk's point that meetings are about action and decision-making. And if your presence in the meeting is not assisting in those two aims, your time would most likely be better spent doing other things.

Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO of the online advertising site Yelp, has a different approach to meetings. He likes to meet individually with each of his direct reports on a weekly basis to better understand each worker's current goals and challenges. “Sometimes I feel like the company's psychiatrist,” said Stoppelman. “But I do feel like listening to people and hearing about their problems (personal and professional) cleans out the cobwebs and keeps the organization humming.”¹⁶

Whatever protocols you institute for meetings at your company, creating a process to facilitate effective meetings can provide many benefits. But it also requires an understanding of why meetings are important, how different types of meetings have different purposes and how proper preparation, execution, and follow-up will ensure that meetings at your organization are a productive use of people's time. As a general rule, you should facilitate only the type of meeting you would want to attend yourself. According to a recent study, middle managers spend up to 35 percent of their time in meetings and senior level executives spend up to 50 percent.¹⁷ Is all of this time spent in meetings productive? When asked in one study if workers leave meetings with a clear understanding of the next action item, 46 percent of participants answered: “some of the time,” “rarely,” or “never.”¹⁸ Not exactly an encouraging response. Meetings in the workplace should never be about talking; they should be about creating meeting assets in the form of decisions, action items or consensus. A meeting should provide a clear benefit to attendees and a clear understanding of their role in the meeting as well as their purpose for being there. We've all been to a meeting that meandered from one topic to the next without a clear point. Experiences such as these are why organizational expert Thomas Kayser once described a meeting as, “An interaction where the unwilling, selected from the uninformed, led by the unsuitable, to discuss the unnecessary, are required to write a report about the unimportant.”¹⁹ Too many times meetings are just excuses to gather and talk rather than accomplishing a specific objective that needs to be achieved. Meetings should be about strategies being considered, action items being implemented, and decisions being made. They should be focused and clear, with active participation and accountability expected from all in attendance. Research shows that when employees feel accountable for the work that they do, they are more likely to contribute to solving problems and achieving goals for the benefit of the organization.²⁰ One reason meetings don't create assets and don't accomplish their objective is the result of a phenomenon called diffusion of responsibility, whereby a person is less likely to take responsibility for action or inaction when others are present.

Good meetings should follow an agenda and strive for conclusion. This means turning agenda items into actions for which people will be held accountable. Good meetings should be viewed as an organizational tool that can solve problems and align teams. Done well, meetings can save time and drive engagement, beginning with an objective that can be clearly stated and that everyone can organize around. If you are a leader and have the authority to convene and facilitate a meeting, you owe it to your team and organization to be prepared for it. Leading a diverse team also means that you will have many different personalities and different people in your meetings. Vanessa Redgrave, a member of the legendary acting dynasty, once said the following about a theatre audience that could just as easily apply to a group of meeting attendees, “We all come . . . with baggage. The baggage of our daily lives, the baggage of our problems, the baggage of our tragedies, the baggage of being tired.”²¹ This is one more reason to stay attuned to the mood and energy of a room and adjust your delivery as needed. Members of a team also have distinct viewpoints and come to a meeting with individual needs and expectations. As a facilitator, it is your job to make sure the needs of all stakeholders in a meeting are being met and everyone is working toward a common goal.

There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.

—PETER DRUCKER

Research shows that as much as one-third to one-half of the U.S. population identify themselves as introverted.²² If any of your attendees are introverted, you will need to facilitate your meetings in a different way than you would if the group consisted only of people who are more outgoing or extroverted. An introverted employee may struggle in a meeting that is filled with bigger personalities. If you notice participants who are not being heard, gently encourage them to share their thoughts or views on the subject being discussed. You may also want to wait until the meeting is over to solicit feedback from introverted team members, and then do so in private. Many employees, even those who do not necessarily consider themselves introverted, are hesitant to publicly challenge or disagree with others in a meeting. But good meeting facilitators understand that a certain amount of creative conflict is healthy within a team. Challenging the thoughts and ideas of others in a constructive way not only benefits the person issuing the challenge, it can also create a more collaborative environment for the team as a whole.

Poorly run meetings hurt morale, reduce employee engagement, and waste corporate resources. Andy Grove, the former chief executive at the microchip giant Intel, once wrote: “Just as you would not permit an employee to steal a piece of office furniture, you should not let anyone walk away with the time of his fellow managers.”²³ In their book Rework, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson detail the consequences of poorly run meetings, writing: “When you think about it, the true cost of meetings is staggering. Let's say you're going to schedule a meeting that lasts one hour, and you invite 10 people to attend. That's actually a 10-hour meeting, not a 1-hour meeting. You're trading 10 hours of productivity for 1 hour of meeting time. And it's probably more like 15 hours, because there are mental switching costs that come with stopping what you are doing, going somewhere else to meet, and then resuming what you were doing beforehand.”²⁴

Because the average worker's week is filled with tasks and obligations that need to be met, every hour they spend trapped in an unproductive meeting is one less hour they have to complete their work. Because all meetings have opportunity costs, good leaders keep their meetings short and focused. And just because a meeting is scheduled for an hour doesn't mean you can't end early and let people get back to their other work. There is an adage called Parkinson's Law that says work will always expand to fill the time available for its completion.²⁵ In other words, if you schedule a meeting for an hour, that meeting will most likely fill up that entire hour, whether that amount of time is needed or not. By scheduling that same meeting for only half an hour, you create an urgency to keep things moving and get through the agenda in a shorter amount of time. Too often we overestimate the time needed for meetings and end up losing hours of productivity in the process. By shortening your meetings, you will spend your time more efficiently and people will feel more productive as a result.

One study found that 47 percent of people listed “too many meetings” as the number-one time-waster at work.²⁶ Meetings that are scheduled with no other purpose than to rehash content that was discussed at previous meetings will make people feel like their time is not being well spent. Including too many people in a meeting is also something that should be avoided. The larger the meeting, the less accountable meeting attendees will feel toward making contributions of ideas or effort. Researchers call this social loafing. According to Andrew Carton of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, another reason to keep your meeting size small is that victims of meeting bloat are more likely to blame others for their problems versus offering solutions themselves.²⁷ Other elements that commonly derail a productive meeting include disruptive behaviors, fatigued attendees, lack of involvement, and unclear meeting objectives.

Most people attending meetings in the modern work environment struggle to be fully present and often face numerous distractions. One study found that 92 percent of people admitted to multitasking during work meetings.²⁸ Actors improvising a scene know that being fully present in the moment is the key to effective collaboration. When one actor is not present and focused on his fellow actor—when he is “soloing”—the forward motion of a scene gets stopped cold. The same principle holds true for a team gathered for a brainstorming or problem-solving meeting. If meeting attendees are not present and engaged with the agenda and their fellow attendees, the group could miss out on an opportunity to discover a workable solution or new idea. Business communication requires being present, listening to those around you and reacting in the moment. While it can be uncomfortable or intimidating to put forward a suggestion in a meeting, a good meeting leader will create an environment where all attendees feel safe to share their opinions and ideas.

Effective leaders are also able to adjust in the moment to circumstances when a change of course is necessary, such as when a new idea emerges or a sudden conflict arises that needs to be addressed. “Yes, and. . .” is a rule-of-thumb response in improvisation that suggests an improviser in a scene should accept what another participant has stated and then expand on that line of thinking. For example, one actor may say, “Boy, it is really cold out today!” and the other person onstage may respond, “Yes, and I forgot my winter coat!” Drawing upon this classic tenet of improvisation and embracing the spirit of “Yes, and. . .,” meeting attendees can let ideas fly without anxiety or the fear of judgment. By creating this open and imaginative space, people will feel free to contribute ideas, confident that their suggestions won't simply be dismissed without consideration. On the stage, as in the boardroom, saying no kills collaboration and shuts down meaningful dialogue. Communicating in the spirit of “Yes, and. . .” allows meeting attendees to listen to each other and suspend judgment by creating a safe space for critical thinking.

Without data you're just another person with an opinion.

—W. EDWARDS DEMING

One of the challenges of the current work environment is that people attend a lot of meetings, sometimes one right after the other. The danger of scheduling back-to-back meetings means that you can carry the emotions of one meeting into the following meeting without giving yourself a chance to reset and begin the next meeting from a calm and neutral place. Just like a group of actors gathering to rehearse a play, coworkers assembling for a meeting should enter the meeting prepared and ready to offer up their ideas and energy. As Stanislavski advised, “Never come into the theatre with mud on your feet. Leave your dust and dirt outside. Check your little worries, squabbles, petty difficulties . . . outside . . . all the things that . . . draw your attention away.”²⁹ The “mud” that Stanislavski warns us about is anything—stress, personality clashes, or other distractions—that hinders a group's ability to accomplish their objective. Whether you are a meeting leader or a meeting attendee, you should approach every meeting from a focused starting place. Imagine what happens if you have a heated argument with a coworker and then head straight into a meeting with a client to negotiate pricing for an upcoming project. Because your heart is still racing and your mind is still replaying the previous exchange, there is a good chance your emotions may hinder your ability to think clearly and make sound decisions. One way to avoid this happening is to schedule breaks between your back-to-back meetings to give yourself some breathing room to let your emotions settle before proceeding to your next meeting.

Another reason to keep meetings concise and focused is that workers in the modern business environment have limited attention spans. Research by the National Science Foundation suggests that the average person can experience up to 50,000 thoughts every day, so it is no wonder the pressures and stress of our day-to-day responsibilities have affected our ability to listen and focus.³⁰ One study in the United Kingdom found that the average person's attention span has fallen to just 5 minutes, down from 12 minutes 10 years prior.³¹ And modern distractions such as text messages and various other alerts don't help. Research conducted by the University of California at Irvine found that the average worker is interrupted or switches tasks every three minutes and five seconds.³² And these interruptions, whether they are phone calls, e-mails, or in-person visits, cause the worker to take an average of 25 minutes to get back to their original task.³³ Distractions and interruptions also affect the quality of work that takes place. Researchers at Michigan State found that interruptions of less than 3 seconds doubled the rate of errors on a task.³⁴

As previously established, if attendees at your meeting appear bored or disengaged with the topics being discussed, it is up to you to engage them. Start by reading the body language of those in attendance if you want to know how your meeting is going. Are attendees enthusiastically contributing ideas or are they quiet and hesitant? Do they seem engaged or do they look bored or disinterested? Conversely, if your boss or other senior leader is running the meeting, be conscious of the nonverbal cues you are communicating as an attendee. Slouching, dozing off, or checking your phone sends a negative message about your level of engagement and one your boss is unlikely to appreciate. An extreme example of this occurred in 2016 when a government official named Kim Yong-Jin accidentally dozed off during a meeting being run by North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Un was reportedly so furious at the display of disrespect that he had the man executed by firing squad for the offense.³⁵

Power is a tool, influence is a skill; one is a fist, the other a fingertip.

—NANCY GIBBS

Because of space constraints or audience size, meetings often occur in less formal settings such as boardrooms, conference rooms, or offices. When facilitating while seated at a table, body language is still important. It is easy to let all of your energy drain into your chair instead of focusing it outward toward the person you are addressing. Make sure your voice and body language are supporting your intentions when speaking and avoid slumping in your chair as this may make you appear overly casual or too relaxed. Continue to use expressive gestures to underscore or support the points you are trying to make, but since your audience is closer, gestures can be smaller in size. Keep your eyes up and try not to look down at the table while speaking. Connect with every person at the table, including the people sitting on either side of you. Keep both feet firmly on the floor to help you stay grounded and limit extraneous movement such as shifting and fidgeting. Rest both hands on the table, either folded or near each other when you are not using them and be careful not to play with objects such as rings, pens, or paper clips as this can be distracting.