By BLR Founder and Publisher Bob Brady
Meetings.
Don’t you just hate them? You know the joke about holding a meeting to decide whether to hold a meeting? It rings true. Meetings are huge time wasters. Or are they?
Over the years I’ve read articles and heard speeches about how to eliminate meetings. “Hold them standing up.” “Calculate the cost of everyone’s time and ask if it is worth it.” “Don’t allow them during core hours of the workday.”
That’s certainly how I thought. Meetings were hated and avoided. I communicated by note and memo. (This was before e-mail and voice mail.) I could stay at my desk and get work done instead of listening to everyone (else) pontificate.
That strategy worked for a tiny company. Why have a meeting when there were only two or three of us? It got less effective as we grew to a size at which success depended on the coordinated performance of many members of complex teams—not just on individual contributions.
About 15 years ago, things came together that changed my thinking. We had grown to about 80 people, and our VP of Operations and Finance, Lou Musante, came to me and said, “you know, you’ve got good relationships with your individual reports, but we aren’t a team, and it is causing problems.” Balls were being dropped when team members weren’t given the details of new initiatives. Friction was created when one manager did something (often at my direction) that created problems in another’s area.
Lou’s suggestion was a weekly staff meeting at which the members of my team came to talk over the issues that faced them and the company. No doubt this will seem like “DUH!” territory to many of you, but it was a revelation to me. It helped us solve operational problems, and it also met core emotional needs that almost all people have. We bonded! (Trite, but true.)
Not that the meetings were all sweetness and light. At the better meetings, there was heated discussion. But this was… and is … more productive than the backbiting that occurs when the same items are taken up in individual discussions.
So, I’m preaching with the conviction of a convert. Good meetings use time effectively to communicate policy and strategy, float trial balloons and see their flaws—and get multiple brains focusing on critical issues. They also get the team committed to the strategy … and to one another.
Enter the “Folder Meeting”
In recent years we’ve adopted an individual weekly “folder meeting” with each member of the team. In folder meetings, managers have my undivided attention. They generate the agenda and report on performance indicators under their purview and anything else important that has come up since the last meeting.
As we’ve become more “virtual” (two of my key team members work remotely—one in California, one in Florida), we’ve adapted the formula to telephone meetings. It presents some challenges, but technology and cultural changes are making it much easier.
We hold the folder meetings in my office, but I recently reread Andrew Grove’s classic High Output Management, and he advises otherwise. Hold them in the subordinate’s office, he says, so you can get an idea of how the manager is organized. Grove, a major player in Intel’s success, is a force worth listening to.
What makes a good meeting? The details are too numerous for this column, but process is important. Another of my mentors, Ray Mikulak, says a meeting has to have an agenda, a schedule, and minutes. Without those key elements, meetings quickly become the time wasters that give rise to “meet-o-phobia.” People don’t know what they’re there for or what they are supposed to do once they leave. He introduced a wonderful form that puts all this on a single sheet of paper that we’ve used for going on 20 years. (E-mail me at HRDailyAdvisor@blr.com, and I’ll send you a copy.)
Or we can discuss it … at our next meeting.