CEO’s Guide To Productive Meetings

We’re part of a business culture that’s heavy on consensus-building and meetings…and frankly, it’s sucking the productivity out of our workforce. Productivity is money and unnecessary meetings cost US businesses $37 billion in salary dollars.

I realized that I hit ‘meeting rock bottom’ at my company when about three weeks ago HBR sent me an email for an ebook with their top meeting efficiency articles and instead of the immediate archive, I clicked, purchased, and four minutes later, was engrossed.  

As the leader of a growing company that’s constantly evolving, it’s important to have frequent meetings to stay on top of everything. The problem, however, is that this same meeting structure that required more face-to-face in the early, chaotic stages, is carried through organizations far after they exit that initial phase. Even with hired experts to handle intricate parts of business strategy, long-winded meetings occur regularly (62 meetings on average a month). This creates a culture where time is spent more on attending meetings than on creating amazing work.

When I sat in on our last executive meeting, I realized enough was enough and had to put an end to the madness. Instead of meeting on the normal topics and updates, somehow we had a meeting…about the meeting. Why were we having it? What was the purpose of each person being there? How could we make it better?  It turns out my people were feeling it too and anxious to find a solution.  Here are the insights we netted out that you can take back to your organization.

If the meeting is just for you and not for the others attending – you are being lazy and disrespectful to your team.

As a business leader, you’re running in a million different directions at any given moment. To provide some overall clarity, you schedule a weekly meeting where everyone brings you an update. Except, you are completely unprepared and haven’t read anything from the previous meeting. Don’t worry you’re not the only one, 65% of meetings are scheduled without a pre-planned agenda. But what happens? The whole meeting is a recap of updates that were most likely, already talked about. An hour that your team could have spent working on their actual responsibilities was spent on filling the gaps you didn’t prepare for.

As an executive, your primary role is to always be the most prepared person in the room. If the meeting is just an update for you, block out that same hour to review all the documents that were created for you, and give your team back an hour of productivity instead. Then just add any follow-up questions, send the documents back to your team, and if and only if absolutely necessary, take 15-20 minutes to clarify or talk through difficult issues.  

Your people will love you for this and your team will be more and more prepared week after week as they get used to this new streamlined format.

Collaboration and talking through ideas with the team is good, right?

The problem is, that in a ideation meeting we end up spending a good amount of time or all of it just getting to a rough draft. All the while, wasting precious time that a large number of people could have spent elsewhere. If you’re responsible for a core area of the business, say finance, there doesn’t need to be an ‘all stakeholders meeting’ just to buy NetSuite or Zuora. As the head of finance, you need to block out hours to diagnose the issue, come to the table with reasonable solutions, and then use a meeting only for creating buy-in or gaining feedback.  This way participants can tweak an idea rather than brainstorm and land right where you would have landed on your own had you blocked out the appropriate prep time.

Start blocking out more time to prep and less time in meetings and see everyone’s productivity rise. In addition, use tools like email, Slack or Trello to keep the conversations brief and out of the meeting room.

Want to try this out right now? Take a look at the steps below:

Step 1: Look at your calendar right now and cancel one meeting with a person or team that can send you notes/work for you to review on your own time. Once you review, send edits and set up a 15-minute meeting to review the final draft after they make your changes.

Step 2: Rinse and repeat with every similar meeting in your calendar. After doing this myself, and it’s sad to admit, I have added about 6-8 hours per week of creating necessary business items instead of meeting to just talk about creating.

We just had our first meeting with the principles listed above and although not perfect, it feels like a move in the right direction. Even if we all slipped up and spoke of things that could be handled outside of the meeting, it was a successful first go-around. My goal is to make every one of our internal meetings 30 minutes or shorter, with the caveat that the saved time will be spent on preparing and creating.

I’ll share updates as we grow and try to fight the frenemy of productivity – meetings!  In the meantime, let me know of any tips you have to cut meeting times and increase efficiency.

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What tips do you have for making weekly meetings something to look forward to?