Stop the Meetings Madness!

People Getting Bored in Meeting and Presenter Speaking

It happened again just the other day. I was walking out of a conference room where we had been in a two-hour meeting. Nothing was resolved. I needed to speak with the CEO so I asked him if he would join me for a coffee. He said, “I really want to, but I’m in meetings all afternoon, and then I’m leaving for a series of all-day meetings in San Francisco tomorrow. We might be able to have a call in the morning while I’m on the way to the airport, or we can have breakfast next Tuesday – I know it’s important but I’m booked solid.” Sound familiar?

Meetings are how executives spend most of their time; they are a fact of life–incessant and seemingly uncontrollable. One colleague told me he sometimes feels like a hamster stuck on a wheel, going from meeting to meeting, unable to get off or stop. Meetings take on a life of their own.

When I was CEO of American Express Bank, I would automatically receive a set-in-stone schedule of mandatory corporate meetings for the coming year—monthly business reviews, annual planning reviews, management evaluation reviews, etc. In fact, whenever I have run a large company, about 70 percent of my time has been scheduled for me, not by me. A friend unfamiliar with business practices asked me one time, “How can this be, if you’re running the company? Don’t you control everything?” But the truth is that the more senior you are, the more this happens. This meetings schedule just exists—like a machine on auto-pilot.

Most meetings are scheduled for an hour–when in reality a fraction of that time would suffice. And the managers at the top are so stuck in the “meetings habit,” that they rarely consider the actual impact on other individuals in the company when they require them to attend meetings. While everyone knows the general subject matter of the meeting in advance, the specifics of what is to be discussed and decided are often not disclosed. Usually you’re not entirely sure why you’re going or what the real purpose of the meeting is.

What really happens in most meetings? In my experience, the discussion is focused on either the past or present, while little time is spent talking about specific steps needed to produce better outcomes in the future. Often, there is debate around whatever the findings are, with people falling over one another trying to explain why the poor results they just reported are really not that bad. Sometimes when I am listening to these long-winded rationalizations I am reminded of the old Irish joke, “If three guys tell you you’re drunk, sit down.”

Information presented in meetings is highly summarized, usually offered up via PowerPoint, and is geared to gain acceptance of whatever the “ask” is. Seldom are viable alternatives and choices presented. The tough questions (“What other options did we consider?” “Do we really understand the factors that created the situation in the first place?”) are hardly ever posed, in part because people want to be perceived as team players and not challenge anyone, and also because they have not given any thought to alternatives–since they’re already sold on the recommendation. Recommendations that start out as “aggressive and bold” when initially conceived are frequently diluted and/or rejected because “we’ll never get this approved by our EVP.” So the top leaders never get to see what people are really thinking.

Meetings tend to wear people out. It’s not just the time spent in the meeting itself. A significant amount of time is required to research and prepare the meetings documents. The pace of meetings is relentless, the conversations are fairly predictable, very little is ever decided, and there is little hope that the process will change. So a sense of futility, resignation and acceptance of this as a way of life sets in—in other words, people disengage. The overabundance of meetings and lack of decisions make any real initiative almost impossible; everyone is continuously in reacting mode. The lower-level employees are not even a part of the equation, except for the fact that they can’t reach any of their bosses, who are all in a meeting! Why are the meetings running the people, instead of the people running the meetings? How did this way of doing things get so set in stone?

One thing is for sure: A new meetings model needs to be created. Just because something has been done a certain way forever does not mean it’s the right way to go. When it comes to meetings we need to rethink, revamp, and re-engage.

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