Make your meetings matter

STEVEN G. ROGELBERG
MARCH 15, 2019
THE DEAL

Dave, a senior VP at a large US bank, was a strong one-on-one manager. However, 360-degree feedback revealed that he struggled in one critical area: leading effective meetings. Many employees described his meetings as “a time suck”. They complained that he asked them to meet too often, allowed a few people to dominate and failed to create an environment where attendees engaged in critical thinking. These comments took Dave by complete surprise. He’d thought he was doing well with meetings — better than most of his peers, anyway.
Dave is not the first manager to overestimate his abilities in this area. Research suggests that of the 23 hours that executives spend in meetings each week, on average, eight are unproductive. Some 90 per cent of people report daydreaming in meetings and 73 per cent admit they use meeting time for other work. And yet research by me and others shows that leaders consistently rate their own meetings very favourably — and much more positively than attendees do. For instance, a telephone survey of more than 1300 managers found that while 79 per cent said the meetings they initiated were extremely or very productive, only 56 per cent said the same about meetings initiated by others — clear evidence of an “I’m not the problem” attitude.
When leaders assume that their meetings are going well, they are less apt to solicit feedback. As a result, frustrations that attendees commonly cite in surveys persist, leaving them disgruntled and disengaged. And the associated costs are significant. Apart from the actual time wasted — estimated to be worth more than $US30 billion a year in the US alone — there are opportunity costs of employees’ not working on more important, inspiring or revenue generating tasks. Reduced engagement has been shown to diminish everything from performance and innovation to service delivery, helping others, and teamwork. One recent study found that the effects of a bad meeting can linger for hours in the form of attendee grousing and complaining. Finally, leaders who continue to run ineffective meetings, thereby failing to make the best use of the talent around them, might eventually see attrition on their teams and an erosion of their power and influence.
When consequences such as these are pointed out, a common impulse is to decree that all meetings should be eliminated. But a no-meetings policy is unrealistic and counterproductive. Meetings can efficiently bring together ideas and opinions and allow people to do their jobs in a more co-ordinated manner. They help individuals form a coherent whole that is more adaptive, resilient and self-directing, especially in times of crisis. Most important, meetings establish and promote consensus, serving as focal points for collective drive and energy.
So the goal should be not to kill all meetings but to eliminate ineffective ones and improve the quality of those that remain. To do this, leaders must understand what they do well and not so well in meetings, but few organisations promote self-awareness in this area. While presenting at a large HR conference, I asked attending executives (many of them from Fortune 500 companies) how many included questions about meeting effectiveness in their employee engagement surveys. One study found that despite the prevalence of meetings today, 75 per cent of those surveyed had received no formal training in how to conduct or participate in them.
It’s therefore up to managers to objectively assess and improving their own meeting skills. Here’s how.
ASSESSMENT
Better meeting leadership requires better self-observation. Take a few minutes after each meeting you run to reflect. Think about attendee behaviour, conversational dynamics and the content that was covered. Were people distracted? Conducting side conversations? Who did most of the talking? Was it you? One or two other people? Did the discussion stray? Were all the opinions and ideas fairly similar? If you answer yes to some or all of these questions, there’s a problem. It’s also important to note the positive aspects of your meetings, such as full participation and healthy debate. What seemed to energise people? What can you do to encourage that kind of engagement?
In addition to these routine scans, check in periodically with people who attend your meetings. You can do this in person, making sure to emphasise that you truly want candid feedback, or you can use technology to gauge participants’ attitudes. For instance, as a follow-up to his 360, Dave conducted a three-question online survey to ask his peers and direct reports what worked well in his meetings, what needed improvement and what suggestions folks had.
Once you’ve reflected on your own and solicited feedback from others, identify your key strengths and weaknesses and create a plan for improvement. In my consulting, I’ve found it useful to focus on two areas: preparation and facilitation.
PREPARATION
Few of us would question the notion that presentations, client work and many other business activities require thought and planning. But people routinely ignore this best practice when it comes to meetings. Especially with regularly scheduled ones, it’s easy to simply show up and default to the usual way of doing things. But when you’re a steward of others’ time, you owe it to them to make some upfront investment.
Before you hold a meeting, make deliberate choices. First, know exactly why you’re convening the meeting and define your goals to set the stage for achieving them. This process may include asking others to suggest agenda items, which promotes relevance and increases engagement. If you don’t have a clear mission or a list of agenda items, you should probably cancel.
Once you know why you’re meeting, decide who needs to be there. Too many attendees can lead to a cacophony of voices or social loafing (whereby individuals scale back their efforts under the protection of a crowd), not to mention logistical challenges. That said, you don’t want to pare the invite list down so much that necessary people aren’t there or others feel slighted. To find the right balance, think carefully about key decision makers, influencers and stakeholders. Make sure that those outside the circle feel included by asking for their input before the meeting and promising to share it. You might also consider a timed agenda, with attendees joining only the portions of the meeting pertinent to them.
Next, focus on time and place. It’s human nature to stick to the same room, same hour and same general setup. But those routines can cause people to glaze over. Instead, find ways to introduce variety. Move to a different venue, meet in the morning instead of the afternoon, experiment with non-traditional time blocks (50 minutes instead of an hour), or change the seating arrangements. For groups of two to four people, you might suggest a walking meeting. For larger groups, try standing, which has been shown to boost attendee satisfaction — provided the sessions are kept short.
For high-stakes meetings, your preparation should go even further. Try having a “pre-mortem”, which involves imagining that the meeting has failed and working backward to ascertain why. Then plan the meeting in a way that avoids or mitigates those problems.
Dave’s big issue was that he held recurring weekly meetings whether he had a compelling agenda or not. So he changed the cadence to every other week, and in the off weeks created a slot that everyone on the team agreed to keep empty for either heads-down work or an impromptu meeting, should an urgent issue surface. This significantly reduced the quantity of meetings while improving their quality. Still, Dave had more work to do. He needed to improve his meeting facilitation.
FACILITATION

Facilitation starts the moment attendees walk into the room. Because people often experience meetings as interruptions, the leader’s first task is to promote a sense of presence. There are several ways to do this: by greeting people at the door, expressing gratitude for their time and offering snacks. Start with a purposeful opening statement. Recognise group or individual accomplishments or remind attendees of “meeting values” — agreed-upon rules of engagement. All these tactics help people feel welcome and primed to tackle the task at hand.
Try to adopt a stewardship mindset, asking questions, engaging others, drawing out concerns and managing conflicts. Of course, leaders at times will need to offer their own opinions and directives to move the discussion forward, but the key to successful facilitation is understanding that you’re primarily playing a supportive role. This ensures a genuine give-and-take where attendees feel safe speaking up and leave feeling committed to the outcomes.
What are some techniques for getting attendees to participate? Try using time allotments for each agenda item to see whether that ensures equitable “air time”. To gauge interest in an idea, ask for a show of hands or, if you think anonymity might help, use a quick-survey app. Then share and discuss the aggregate results. To prevent groupthink, incorporate periods of silence to let people come up with ideas or form opinions without hearing others’ thoughts. “Brainwriting”, for instance, involves having individuals quietly reflect and write down their ideas before sharing them out loud; research shows that this approach yields more creative thinking than brainstorming does. Silent reading can also be useful. Asking attendees in a meeting to read a proposal to themselves before discussing it can increase their understanding and retention of the new idea.
Dave had two facilitation issues to address. He needed to get more people talking, and he wanted them to engage in real debate. To address the participation problem, he began to periodically remind attendees that he wanted everyone to be involved and expected teammates to encourage one another to speak up. He solicited people’s ideas and opinions in advance to make sure he highlighted their concerns. He made a point of asking quieter attendees to contribute thoughts or lead particular agenda items. And when he began to see better dynamics, he reinforced them by offering comments such as: “I’m loving this discussion.”
REASSESSMENT
Even when managers diagnose their meeting problems and learn to better prepare for and facilitate the gatherings they lead, there will always be room for improvement. And so the process begins again. In Dave’s case, after a few months of experimenting with the tactics I’ve described, he asked his team for another frank assessment. Everyone thought his meetings had vastly improved. But a new issue emerged. Some attendees felt that meetings were still longer than justified; discussions sometimes rambled. So Dave decided to shave five or 10 minutes off his schedules to create a bit more urgency and focus.
Interestingly, people also offered suggestions that had nothing to do with meetings but were designed to address process issues in the department. At first, Dave was taken aback. But then he realised that in changing the way he ran his meetings, he’d shifted the culture on his team. He’d shown he was a leader who valued reflection, learning and flexibility, and his employees were rewarding him with proactive problem-solving.
Leading meetings might seem like a small part of a manager’s job. But positive change in this one arena can lead to real gains for companies and their employees. If your organisation isn’t training you in this key skill, it’s time for you to develop it on your own using these strategies.
Steven G. Rogelberg is the chancellor’s professor at the University of North Carolina Charlotte for distinguished national, international and interdisciplinary contributions; the director of its organisational science program; and the author of The Surprising Science of Meetings: How You Can Lead Your Team to Peak Performance. Copyright 2019 Harvard Business Review/Distributed by NYTimes Syndicate