This is my calendar from a recent week. Granted some of these were client interviews, but needless to say, the real work and thinking was done between meetings, or at night at the hotel. The time before and after the meeting were also “wasted” because I was either walking to, waiting for, or late for another meeting.
“Meetings are a symptom of bad organization. The fewer meetings the better.”
Peter Drucker really said it best. I cannot agree with this statement enough.
Meetings are often a waste of time
There are often TOO many people invited, for TOO long of a time, covering TOO little content, with TOO little accountability. Elon Musk said it too: “Walk out of the meeting” if you’re not adding value
It is a ripple effect
One company discovered that a weekly executive meeting was consuming 300,000 hours of time annually because of the trickle down effect. 1 weekly meeting took up 7,000 hours (headcount x hours x weeks). However, that forced 11 unit meetings (20,000 hours), forced 21 team meetings (63,000 hours) and forced 130 preparatory meetings (210,000 hours) in a chain reaction. HBR article here.
Meetings are often disrespectful
I have been invited to many meetings where the presenter is “holding court”, essentially walking through their agenda, and essentially holding the audience hostage. Bad form, disrespectful, and a bit sad.
In my mind, the person calling the meeting should invest at least 10-20x the effort to accomplish the goals of the meeting ahead of time without calling the meeting. Do the work ahead of time. You have to earn the right to call a meeting.
If you want to get input on an idea, project, proposal, or initiative. . . do the research, put together a persuasive powerpoint, walk the halls and talk to the right people, send out an email to get feedback, get buy-in, and start doing the work. Once it has momentum, get the right funding and resources in place and call the kick-off meeting.
Meetings are poorly run
Some people are better than others, but some meetings have no agenda, no facilitation, no sense of on-time start, on-time end, or meeting minutes. In consulting world, that is unacceptable. Time = money. As some of us like to quip, “That is an hour of my life that I will never get back.”
Meetings are indiscriminate
We all get invited to meetings once in a while when we wonder. . . “why was I invited?” I don’t know anything about that. Frankly, if you are not contributing to the meeting (have a speaking or deciding role), you don’t need to be there. You can get the meeting minutes, or run-down from someone afterwards. Whenever I decide to NOT accept a meeting invite, and discover that the meeting was unproductive and blah, I consider it a huge win.
Meetings are band-aids
Too often, meetings are the only way things get done within a company. Without meetings, people don’t know what to do, how to do it, and are afraid to take action. It creates limited forward progress, and yet, they are need because some progress is better than none. It is often a manual solution to a systemic problem.
BCG describes something so painfully simple, “know what people do“. Have clear roles and responsibilities. Just holding another meeting does not solve the root cause of the problem.
Meetings reduce leverage
People get stacked on top of each other, observing, commenting, and group-thinking answers. Have been in meetings where there is a VP, Director, Manager, and Analyst from the same department. Hmm, not efficient.
Meetings are inevitable
I am not so Pollyanna that I believe meetings can be abolished. In fact, it is how most organizations function. They use meetings to push things along, generate momentum, and gain consensus.
Ideally, organizations would have very few meetings because people would know the organization / department / personal mission, collaborate daily, know where to find information and resources, innovate, make mistakes, but organically course-correct within a culture of trust and growth. Sadly, that is rare.
In the same HBR aricle here, research shows that 15% of company time is in meetings. A number that has increased every year since 2008. In the consulting world where time is money, 15% of your time to meetings is probably unwise, and maybe, unacceptable.