This weekend, while enjoying our two-hour time slot at our condo pool, I listened to a podcast hosted by Stephen J. Dubner. In case you don’t remember Stephen, he’s the co-author of one of my favorite books, Freakonomics. Now I must admit that Economics was probably my least favorite subject in business school, so to go from dreaded classes using formulas and demand curves that analyze the impact of taxes and government legislation to something cool is quite a feat. But Dubner and his co-author Steven Levitt managed to make economics cool.
They did so by making interesting connections we may not have considered societal trends. For example, Dubner posed the question, “Why do drug dealers still live with their moms?”. Conventional wisdom tells us that drug dealers are wealthy, yet when a University of Chicago Ph.D. student got to know members of a local gang, he became intrigued by their operation. The researcher found that the gang’s leader was a college graduate and had a business background. After six years of living with the gang, he found that it had quite a hierarchy. The leader paid about 20% of his revenues to his most senior gang leaders for the right to sell crack in their areas. He had three officers under him, and beneath them were street salesmen called foot soldiers. At the bottom were gang members who paid dues to the gang, hoping to become foot soldiers someday. So those at the top lived large, but those at the bottom made less than minimum wage. It sounds a little like many of the MLM organizations out there!
In any case, when Dubner decided to tackle the topic of meetings in his podcast, I was all ears. I lived through more than my share of horrible meetings while working in Corporate, so this podcast was a fun trip down memory lane. In true Freakonomics style, he finds a way to connect two things that don’t seem connected, so bear with me on this. Organizational Psychologist Stephen Rogelberg estimates that there are at least 55 million meetings daily in the U.S., and most professionals attend at least 15 meetings weekly, increasing as they move up the organizational hierarchy. Executives often spend 50-90% of their time in meetings.
He begins by interviewing Halle Walker, an expert in African wild dogs who describes observing a sneezing behavior that seems to be directed toward enticing the rest of the pack to go off and hunt. Those of you with dogs may recognize this behavior and find that your pup will sometimes sneeze when he gets excited. It turns out that sneezing is the African wild dog equivalent of “dale” or “let’s go!” After lying around snoozing, the researchers found that one of the dogs would repeatedly sneeze to entice the others to go for a hunt. Sometimes he would get a small following who replied with their own sneezes of agreement; other times, the entire pack would follow, and still others, he would be completely ignored while the other dogs returned to their naps.
Dubner then interviewed group conflict resolution consultant Pria Parker who specializes in facilitating meetings where work actually gets done. Companies often try to resolve their conflicts by holding meetings. As we know, a lot of meetings are unsuccessful. This consultant believes that these meetings are useless because the culture tries to reduce the risk of losing face, so no one says what they think. In her words, “unhealthy peace can be as damaging to the human connection as unhealthy conflict.”
This comment brings us back to the African Wild Dog. It turns out that in successful calls to hunt, there are about seven times more sneezes than unsuccessful rallies. Walker found a relationship between the number of sneezes and the dog’s status initiating the call to hunt. The more dominant the dog who started the sneezing, the more likely the others would follow the call. A dominant dog only required three sneezes to get the others to hunt while a less dominant dog required ten sneezes. Her conclusion is that everyone’s vote matters, but some votes matter more.
Now let’s go back to our business meetings. Imagine a meeting led by the company president, vs. one that is led by the sales manager. Who do you think will get more people to follow when they ask meeting participants to head in a particular direction?
Typical meeting complaints include;
- Attending meetings that aren’t relevant to your work
- Working late to make up for the time you had to be in a meeting
- The senior person in the meeting made it seem important but didn’t stay
- Meetings become routine, but don’t impact the work
- Leaders feel compelled to fill the time allotted to meetings, regardless of the value
Rogelberg surveyed people following meetings and found that the person who led the meeting, talked the most and controlled the experience was the most satisfied with the meeting. In contrast, others who attended were much less positive. In fact, “too many meetings” is often cited as the #1 frustration at work. Around 70% of senior managers view meetings as unproductive, even though they call the most meetings.
As horrible as they often are, we know that people want to have some level of meeting activity per day. Humans are social creatures, and there is value in interaction with others.
So how can we have business meetings that don’t suck? Here are the seven tips I gathered from this podcast:
- The average length of a meeting around the world is 1 hour. This doesn’t reflect the time required for the meeting, but has evolved based on our calendaring tools. The meeting leader should think about how long the meeting should be. Parkinson’s Law tells us that work expands to the available time, so don’t give it as much time. If you add a bit of time pressure, it adds focus. Personally, I think very carefully before scheduling a meeting more than 30 minutes long and for some, I only schedule about 15 minutes.
- Start by establishing the purpose of the meeting. Your Monday morning sales meeting is not a purpose; it’s a category. State your desired outcome and what you want to be different. If nothing would change without the meeting, then scrap the meeting. Think about the meetings you have with customers. Typically you’ll prepare for the meeting and create a plan. We tend to get lazy with internal meetings. Research shows that 50% of internal meeting agendas are recycled. As Dubner states, we would never do that with customers!
- When planning a meeting, don’t frame it around topics to be discussed, plan it around questions to be answered. If you could resolve the discussion via email, then that’s not something that warrants a meeting.
- Participants should be limited to those relevant to the question. Don’t invite people just because you don’t want them to feel bad if they’re excluded. The happy medium is to design a meeting such that people attend the portions more relevant to them. So you may have a larger group at the start of the meeting, and then some people leave, and a smaller group remains to tackle other questions. Leaders should think about attendees who are core vs. secondary. More is not merrier when it comes to meetings. For those not part of the meeting, leaders can ask them for input in advance, have them email their input, and share the minutes. Exclusion isn’t personal; it’s purposeful. By excluding someone, you may be giving them the best gift right now, which is time. Think of meetings as a form of imposition, rather than a reward.
- Start your meetings right on time. Don’t start with news & announcements that could have been communicated in other ways. Don’t let the leader dominate the discussion, or it will be impossible to know if you really have consensus. And don’t run over. Make sure that everyone has a chance to speak. One fun way to start a meeting is to spend the first 10 minutes going around the room and allow everyone to share one good thing and one bad thing that happened during their week. By sharing a bad thing, people tend to get real, and this can change the context of the rest of the meeting. Businesses tend to run on a cult of positivity, and we must be comfortable talking about the uncomfortable stuff too. Positivity prevents progress.
- No multi-tasking. Tell people there will be a break in 30 minutes when they can check their phones. People tend to multi-task to take back control when your meeting sucks.
- You know when to end a meeting because the questions have been answered. At the end of the meeting, issue a last call for comments, but then the leaders should summarize what they want the participants to remember.
During a meeting, the leader has three roles. The first is to connect the participants, the second is to protect them from each other, and the third is to equalize them. This focus helps support the purpose.
Because people are busy, they may not have read the prep materials you send before the meeting. Part of equalizing them is to spend the first few minutes of the meeting reviewing the materials together to make sure everyone has an equal level of understanding. Another effective tool that we can effectively manage with Zoom these days is to split people off into pairs during part of the meeting, have them discuss a problem together, and rejoin the group. This technique tends to increase the level of communication and passion.
Your objective as a meeting leader is to help the participants genuinely interact with each other and produce a decision better than what would surpass what any individual would have made themselves. In this context, passion and conflict within a safe environment are positive.
Dubner raised some great points in this podcast, so let me leave you with this final thought, “if you don’t value your time, no one else will.” My challenge for you this week is that if you’re the leader of a meeting, think about how to make it real. And if you’re invited to a meeting, feel free to question the need for your presence, ask for the agenda before the meeting, and make sure you understand the problem the meeting is intended to address.
Let me end with a final quote. And keep in mind that since I was born in Canada it pains me deeply to say this, but in the words of the co-founder of Polaroid Corporation Edwin Land, “politeness is the poison of collaboration.”
Hope this helps as you tackle the meetings in your agenda this week.