People lurch toward the door as another pointless planning meeting finally, mercifully, comes to an end.
The meeting leader calls out: “Wait! Before everyone leaves, let’s recap what we’ve decided.”
The room goes quiet as people shrug, looking to each other in confusion. One person from the back of the room shouts out what everyone else has been thinking: “Absolutely nothing!” Others mumbled comments like: “That’s another two hours of my life I’ll never get back.” “Now I’ll have to work tonight to make up for this colossal waste of time.” “Why ask for our input when we don’t have a real say?”
Jay, the meeting leader, also happens to be the executive team sponsor of a make-or-break global project. This type of meeting is nothing new for Jay, with its endless loops of repetitive conversations, fruitless debates and domination by a few who are allowed to ride roughshod over others. In fact, if attendance were not mandatory, few people would show up to any of Jay’s meetings.
Given the importance of this project, team members urged Jay to enlist help from an external facilitator to silently observe the next project planning meeting and make recommendations. (Jay would not hear of stepping away from the role of meeting leader.)
The facilitator’s observations:
📌 Jay seemed unfamiliar with the status reports that team members had shared online before the meeting. He wasted people’s time by asking questions that would have been unnecessary had he prepared for the meeting.
📌 He routinely gave more airplay to those who agreed with him and made little effort to draw out ideas from others. As a result, the team was making decisions with incomplete information based on selected perspectives.
📌 Not everyone on the team needed to be there for the whole meeting. Certain conversations involved just a subset of team members, with others appearing disengaged as they remained physically present in case they were needed.
📌 Decision rights were unclear. Which decisions did team members really have a say over? Which team members and which decisions? Was this the time and place decisions would be made, or would someone else be making the decisions later? Had certain decisions already been made, rendering the team’s protracted debates futile?
📌 There appeared to be no structure or time set aside for making decisions. Conversations went in circles, with the same points being made multiple times, sometimes by the same people. Jay appeared either unwilling or unable to close out these discussions and move to a decision.
📌 Despite the fact that Jay began the meeting with a slide entitled “Meeting norms,” no one seemed to follow them or enforce them, least of all Jay, who talked far more than he listened throughout the meeting.
📌 The meeting ended with no recap of decisions, actions, issues or next steps. The meeting ran 10 minutes late with the last three agenda items still left hanging.
Advice for Jay:
💡 Review and update meeting norms as a team. Discuss exactly what each one means and how team members, including the leader, will hold themselves accountable. Encourage everyone to call out transgressions, even the leader’s. Consider including norms about inclusivity, active listening, balanced participation and meeting preparation.
💡 Reach out privately to those who have been quiet and let them know their perspectives are important. Consider reaching out to dominant talkers and ask for their help in drawing out their quiet colleagues or give them another role that requires their full attention.
💡 Create realistic agendas that are structured appropriately for the needed conversation, whether it’s to make decisions, generate new ideas, surface and solve issues or action planning. Share this in advance, along with required preparation.
💡 Allocate at least 5-10 minutes at the end of every meeting to review commitments made, accountabilities, questions that require responses, actions and next steps. Assign a different team member at the end of each meeting to track and report back commitments and actions prior to the next meeting.
💡 As part of Jay’s pre-meeting communications package (a novelty for Jay!) include any decisions to be made during the meeting, required preparation, criteria, process and timing, participants, and next steps. Never surprise people who didn’t come prepared to make an important decision. And also never surprise people who thought they’d be making a decision and now find they are not.
💡 If just a few people need to participate in certain discussions, plan to invite them either first thing or last thing, so non-essential people can join late or drop off early, if they choose.
💡 Give others a chance to run the meeting at least occasionally. It can be a great learning and practice opportunity for others. By alleviating Jay from this role, he’ll have more time to invest in his senior executive role. At the very least, let others plan the agenda, process and timing.
It’s tempting to imagine that a room (or Zoom!) full of capable people with good ideas and the best intentions will naturally produce a good outcome. But all the intelligence, expertise and passion in the world are no substitute for a sound meeting structure, a realistic agenda and agreed-upon guidelines for meeting behavior. This is true even, or maybe especially, for senior leaders who may erroneously assume that effective management skills automatically translate effective meeting facilitation skills.
Links
Downloadable resources from Guided Insights
- Triage model for handling heated conversations – PDF
- Managing Difficult Meeting Dynamics – how-to guide – PDF
Past Communiques
- Handling Dysfunction Without Losing It
- Strategic Planning: Moving From All Talk to Decisive Action
- Tips for Naming the Elephant Safely
- Multicultural Meeting Realities
- Making Asymmetrical Meetings Work
External articles
- How to run effective meetings | McKinsey
- 7 Good Meeting Practices for More Productive Meetings – Atlassian
- 10 Best Practices in Facilitating Leadership Team Meetings — Blog | CoffeePals
P.S. This newsletter never was, and never will be, written with AI.
