Should you review your meetings policy?

'One mediocre meeting after another quietly corrodes our organization, and every day we allow it to happen. We've become so accustomed to long meetings, boring meetings, meetings lacking a clear purpose, that our curiosity about whether there might be a better alternative has faded into the background.' Al Pittampali, 'Read This Before Our Next Meeting'

Meetings are not headline grabbing ? ABS, Innovation and PEP steal the limelight ? but, undertaken with conviction, passion and WOW, they are transformative. Meetings go to the heart of your firm's culture. You can tell more about a firm by listening in on a meeting, than by reading any amount of promotional material. And yet, meetings (still) don't work. In fact, they probably stopped working a very long time ago.

However, before you leap into the unknown, you have to accept that no amount of exaltation will close the knowing/doing gap. Neither will wishful thinking. You have to have the desire, passion and persistence to want to bring about a sea-change in your firm. Stop and focus. What would a firm look like if every meeting worked? Less stress? More action/less talk? And a lot less grunge?

Stand back for a moment. Have you fallen victim to a formulaic model for running meetings? Do the same people always lead the discussion? Do the same people contribute their two penneth worth? Do the same people avoid making any decision? And do certain people (no names please!) refuse to turn up ('We are far too busy!')? It's like you have a silent meeting code, and a lore that appears to define the end, not ?the means.

Recognising the problem

If you are willing to accept that you have a problem then you could do worse then appoint a Meeting Maniac-in-Chief or Meet-ing Buster with the sole aim of radically bettering your performance (think Kaisen or Total Quality Managemnt (TQM)).

But, in all seriousness, even if you haven't got the time or budget to start dishing out novel titles, someone has to take charge of the programme of reinvention. Who is your best organiser or the person that sees no bounds to the development of the business ? weirdos step forward?

If you want to debate the Return on Investment (ROI) on diverting precious resources to something that, on first blush, looks so damn obvious, then ask yourself if adding a 50 per cent improvement to your strike rate i.e. the outturn of each meeting, warrants the diversion?

Too often with meetings people don't take the process seriously, not just because the stick has all but disappeared (a bit of tough love never hurt anyone) but because of the lack of accountability. How many times have you rocked up to a meeting, at which you have held up your end of the bargain, only to find that someone walks in making some vacuous apology for the lack of action, resulting in a rerun of the last meeting and a lot of frustrated people sitting in the room all thinking the same thing but no one having the gumption to call time? And what happens? Not much, except a lot of people complaining about, you-guessed-it: m-e-e-t-i-n-g-s!

It is key that whoever calls the meeting does some serious preparation in advance ? and that means more than just a moribund agenda. A short precis of the up-to-date position wouldn't go amiss, together with a summary of what you would like to ?see happen. If the meeting is there to decide something then the organiser owes it to the group to do more than throw things up in the air and hope for an answer mid-way.

Timing is also critical. There is no point putting together a list that bears no reflection to the allotted time. And likewise don't fill the time: when you are done, you are done. Ask yourself, is everyone present needed? Too often meetings turn into a brainstorming exercise with too much talk and not enough action. If none of the people in the room have the potential or power ?to inform the process, then perhaps their input should be sort in advance and it can be put before the committee who do have the capability.

Next action

If you have read David Allens' superb book 'Getting Things Done' then you will recall that part of the paradigm of being more productive is to ask: what is the next action? Likewise meetings. At every stage of the process, someone should be keeping track of how many actions have been agreed.

Much like the plotting of SMART goals, any next step needs to be given over to one person with a definite time and agreed outcome. There also needs to be an accountability trail that shouldn't just wait until the next meeting. Once something has been done, then that item can be crossed off the list. Try to stop calling impromptu meetings. If you need to get something done, then you could do worse than explore a Hangout in Google+.

The point is that meetings can become addictive. But is every meeting necessary? Really? Ask yourself: If I wasn't at the meeting, could it still go ahead, particularly if I have already responded in writing to the questions that are being posed.

In summary, stop taking meetings for granted. Done well ? dare I say, brilliantly ? they bring to life a business and inculcate a new cultural norm. Done badly they literally suck your soul.

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