Smart Teams, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 5Congregate: make meetings count

Meetings are a common way in which we cooperate together — but, oh boy, do they take up our time! Many of my senior clients spend most of their week in meetings, while middle managers and other staff can spend as much as two days a week in these sessions. This can be a huge drain on productivity, especially if the meetings are not well organised.

The sad fact is that too many of our meetings are unnecessary, take too much time and are poorly planned.

If we want to create a culture that supports productivity, we need to have fewer meetings. I don't imagine that any reader would disagree with this, especially at a senior level, where meetings can take up to 90 per cent of an executive's day.

What's wrong with our meeting culture?

The three key problems with our dysfunctional meeting culture are:

1. too much time spent in meetings
2. too many ‘fuzzy’ meetings that are poorly planned with no clearly stated outcomes
3. poor meeting behaviours that cause productivity friction.

1. Too much time in meetings

In a coaching session with a senior client last year, we sat in front of his calendar to find a good time to plan a critical new project. I knew we would be hard pressed to find any available time over the coming couple of weeks. But as we scrolled through week after week of back-to-back meetings, double-booked meetings, all-day meetings and recurring meetings, I realised just how bad this problem was.

He needed to flip forward eight weeks ...