What do you do to keep your calendar free to have time for what matters?
Our daily working schedule is increasingly becoming an endless succession of meetings. Now, there are cases in which this can be ok. If you are a salesperson and you meet with clients, for example.
In the other cases… well you tell me!
I have been trying to make a sense of why we have got to this point and why we need to run so many meetings. Honestly, I have not been able to find an answer.
Besides the “meeting that could have been an email” there are other meetings that in principle are useful, but they turn out to be an occasion for endless and pointless discussion, ego showing, power exercise, bureaucracy, and politics.
In some of the meetings I have been in, there was such a great focus on how to do something that we lost sight of why we needed to do that thing, who was responsible to do what and what, at the end of the day, we wanted to achieve. Have you been there as well?
Meetings are required and, when run properly, they can add tremendous value. Done wrong they can suck the life out of a team, an organization, and the people in it.
I have seen recently a very interesting (and I guess fictional) screenshot showing a calendar invitation calculating the meeting cost according to the hourly rate of the people involved. This is something that can help us think more in-depth about the opportunity to run that meeting even without considering the amount of time (and, consequently, money) required to prepare for it.
In fact, I am pretty sure that if we calculate the ROI of the meetings we hold, we would stop meeting altogether. Put in another way, this may sound like this: if we spend 10k € per month for meetings, we should generate from them more than 10k €.
To run better and more effective meetings, we should ask 2 questions ourselves:
What do we need to run a meeting for?
How do we need to structure our meeting to generate the intended value?
The first question deals with the reason to call for a meeting. What do we need to meet with others about? Can we discuss it in different ways?
In this case, some sort of best practice can be prepared and shared with the whole organization to help meeting organizers discern and take a good and informed decision about the meeting they want to call. A sort of ROI calculation, not mandatorily monetary, for the meeting should be available and well spread in the organization together with the things that others are doing.
A complete re-assessment of the recurring meetings should be carried out on a regular basis (every 3 months for example). Regular meetings, in fact, are often run on the basis of habits, and, while when we first set them up they were required, they become useless as time passes. A general rule I use in this case is to set up recurring meetings for a maximum of 2 months and re-evaluate at the end of the period if they are still required. One way to re-evaluate without too much thinking is to avoid to re-issue the invitation and avoid holding the meetings for a couple o recurrences and see if the participants notice it and if something got stuck as a consequence.
The second question requires a bit more thinking. What are the meetings that we want to run? How many types of those do we use? How can we make them more effective? These are the questions to answer to start thinking. This is a process. It’s not likely that you will get it right the first time. It is also quite possible that what worked today may not work tomorrow. The suggestion does not to stop experimenting and trying new things and never stop looking outside your organization for ideas but approach what others are doing with critical thinking. You are not the others after all.
If you need help in optimizing your meeting practices, give me a ring!
It can be the first step you take towards doing the best work of your life.