Strategic

CHAPTER 16Meetings

Meeting (mee‐ting), noun: the act of people coming together to rehash topics they've been talking about for five months, check their mobile phones every 10 minutes for anything more interesting than the meeting they're in, and agree to things they have no intention of following up on.

While this definition isn't the one in the dictionary, it's likely a more accurate description of what's happening in organizations than the official version. Let's face it, most meetings, either in‐person or virtual, are wasting people's time and the company's money. Who says? The research.

The average professional invests approximately 21.5 hours per week—more than half the average work week—in meetings, which equates to more than 1,075 hours per year.¹ Unfortunately, managers rated more than half the meetings they were involved in (in‐person or virtual) as “ineffective.” Nearly 85% of senior executives surveyed stated that their meetings were not a good use of individual or group time.²

When you start to calculate the number of hours spent in unproductive meetings across all the people in your organization, the amount of time, money, and energy being wasted is staggering. For example, at one multibillion‐dollar organization, a weekly review meeting involving a group of managers cost more than $15 million per year.³ Would you invest that amount of money in a physical product that was broken? Not likely. You would either fix it or get rid of it. And that's what you need to ...