One thing I am sure of is that you are attending too many meetings.

As your skills become more developed and successful, you will be involved more and more in meetings. I do not envy you at all. You may find that many meetings in your organization do not actually lead to any action being taken. No agreed action points, or action points assigned to people not present, or even worse, nobody monitors the progress in the period before the next meeting. You may even become a “Meeting Junkie” if you do not take heed of this advice.

Hold SCRUM stand-up meetings (10-15 mins) everyday of a project

This have been discussed in a separate article.

Covert your meeting protocols to those of ‘action meetings’

This have been discussed in a separate article. One of which is to have the meeting rules on the table.

Abandon as many meetings as you can

Only participate in meetings that have a reputation for getting things done. Monitor the action after a meeting, and if progress is not being made, make it clear that the next meeting will be deferred until progress has been achieved. Jack Welch, while CEO of GE, would stop presentations covering a project’s progress when he realized they had, in fact, done nothing. He told the culprits to come back at 5 p.m. with some implementation to report.

Ban morning staff meetings (SCRUMS being the only exception)

A beneficial start to the day is to avoid having staff meetings during your productive time. I fail to see why senior management feels the need to have meetings with their direct reports at 9 am on Monday mornings. Such meetings often are followed with more meetings as the debriefing is passed down the chain in the larger organizations. Why not schedule most of your meetings in the afternoon?

Do not allow people to arrive late at the meeting — lock them out

Every late arrival creates a two-minute disruption. That is 20 minutes of lost time where there are 10 people impatiently hearing the excuses for the late arrival. In some organizations, you are only important if you arrive late. If you can get agreement on this rule, you will be surprised how this action will change meeting behavior.

Allow people to leave meetings after their topic has been discussed

Organize the agenda so that people who can only contribute to one agenda item speak to this issue first and are then allowed to leave. This simple change has the added benefit of letting the junior staff speak first, thus avoiding their opinions being influenced by meeting bullies. An entrepreneurial CEO allows attendees to remove themselves from a meeting, with a cursory nod to the chairperson, when they feel their time would be better spent elsewhere. He pointed out to me that after the second departure, you wrap up the meeting swiftly.

Turn meetings into workshops

If you are having many meetings with your staff, maybe they are not progressing. Turn more of your meetings into lock-up workshops with whiteboards and laptops and push the project on by completing a delivery. By doing this, you will also give your direct reports some training as they see how the master does it.

Deliver instead of attending a briefing meeting

As a manager, monitor the number of meetings your team gets drawn into. One IT manager I met vetted all meetings and, in many simple exercises, told the in-house client that they would deliver the solution rather than have a meeting to discuss it.

Keep meetings below the magic number of six participants

At this threshold, the meeting becomes dysfunctional, taking too long, affecting engagement as some junior participants will not have a chance or inclination to participate fully.

Get the seating arrangement right

As chairperson, it may be best to sit in the middle of the table as you will be nearer all participants, including any troublemakers.

Fortnightly one-to-one meetings with direct reports

Schedule your one-to-one meetings with your direct reports fortnightly, as weekly meetings are too frequent; it does not give staff enough time to recover from underperforming in the early part of the week. Consider holding some of these offsite over a lunch, which gives staff a chance to unwind and share more confidential issues.

Beware that in some cultures, to disagree is to rude.

Best to ask staff with Asian backgrounds a question rather than ask if they agree. An international trouble-shooter and a long-term executive for BP Oil related to me whenever local staff reverted to their mother tongue, he knew there was a problem that he had to unearth.

More virtual meetings

Hold more video-based meetings rather than insist on attendees flying in. Your COVID 19 experience will have demonstrated their effectiveness.

 

This is an extract from the toolkit (whitepaper + E-Templates) ,Winning Leadership: A Model on Leadership For The Millennial Manager by David Parmenter