Do you like … doing things? Then you may not like group meetings much.
In a Microsoft survey, 27k out of 40k people felt that meetings were not productive. That was in 2005!
Since then, not much has changed. Apparently, Teams hasn’t made meetings better, nor have other tools or management trainings. About the same proportion of people still feels that meetings are unproductive.
If you’ve moved from a role of doing things to a role where you now lead people who do those things, meetings probably frustrate you. Your memories of actually creating and developing are too fresh.
It’s odd, because in meetings, the language is a lot about “doing”. We talk about actions and we use dynamic language. If it was your first time in a corporate group meeting, you’d think a lot was getting done.
Perhaps that illusion still tricks the rest of those survey respondents, the 30% or so who don’t feel that meetings are unproductive. It’s a powerful illusion for sure, that “action words” lead to actual actions. This myth is busted by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Bob Sutton’s “Knowing-Doing Gap”, a book showing why companies don’t do the things they know they should.
This truth — that meetings are unproductive — has even reached senior leaders and their influencers. (Try searching for HBR too many meetings 🔍.)
A CEO once proclaimed that his company should cut down meetings. Like all such one-time proclamations, it didn’t change things much. The meetings “continued until morale improved”. Which is to say that they just continued.
A few software companies have tried different ways of working, without so many meetings. It worked OK for Wordpress, mostly working remotely (for a nice insider account, see Scott Berkun’s “Year Without Pants”.
More dogmatically, 37 Signals / Basecamp still frowns on meetings. “Meetings are Toxic”, they say.
These companies feel that meetings weren’t great anyway, and remote meetings were worse. Some research confirms that, such as:
But Wordpress and Basecamp’s approach to remote-first working, with more writing and less meeting, hasn’t caught on.
At the start of COVID (2020), it seemed as if the sudden move to remote work might change the way we work more fundamentally. But instead, the meetings continued and even multiplied, with an average of 13% more of them per person.
So — we believe that there are too many meetings, and yet we still keep having them. A classic knowing-doing gap, so it seems. Another source of guilt and pressure.
And yet … are there times when text or canned video truly isn’t enough?
Dare to suggest that on public online forums, and you get shot down as a corporate shill, a mole for “big management”. Witness the poor soul who posted this Reddit thread:
Although they did post it in r/unpopularopinion, so maybe they were ready for the resulting roasting:
“OP is the person who makes people attend meetings” says OppositeChocolate687, to which Large_Traffic8793 replies “And never has an agenda”.
The bravely non-anonymous MaddoxGoodwin throws in “Guaranteed OP host stupid meetings lololol”, and by the end of the thread I feel like shabbir1993, who writes:
After reading all the comments on this post, My question is: What’s the point of any possible human interaction ever in the first place?
But, back in real life, the main point of human interaction at work is to get stuff done, and to get it done right. (A sub-point is to learn stuff and meet some clever and interesting people.)
And for some kinds of interaction, a meeting is actually the best thing. At least that’s what I think. Prepare the roasting tongs!
Imagine this:
One morning, you are writing to your team because another manager has asked if they can help his team out. Not to actually build stuff for his team but to share some knowledge with them, so they can build more effectively.
Your team has a pressing customer commitment at the moment, so can’t spend too much time on this request. But you do want to help, and it makes some organizational sense. They’ve helped you before.
So you are trying to write down the nuance of how much exactly your team should help theirs. But you realize that there is some nuance that just doesn’t work well in text. As you specify the amount of help, and when to give it, your email starts to feel like a legal contract, and you can’t think of enough examples to bring it to life. You realize that the examples are better brought by your team anyway. They are the ones who can best work out what this guidance is going to mean in practice.
If you dictate in detail how they should do things (without enough “why”), they won’t be able to respond to changes. And they could be less motivated, since autonomy motivates most employees. But you still need to chat through this thing with them, hear any concerns and questions, and hear from them how they are going to make it work in practice.
And, you have just realized that there is a major dependency for the current customer commitment that will affect whether your team can really spare any extra time at all. Who knows about that dependency? A couple of your team members. So in any case you need to meet with them to understand how things are going before you could go ahead and direct the whole team to help the other team. (They could write you an update instead, but you’d probably need to talk with them anyway.)
So this all needs a meeting or two. Not super formal but at least a conversation to get things moving.
Isn’t that what meetings are best used for? Helping people get stuff done, and not just any stuff, but the right stuff?*
There really are subtleties around decisions and actions that are best talked over in groups of humans, live and even in the same place if possible. Especially when some of those humans are new to the group, or has members who don’t all have the same native language, or includes people from different functions and teams, who need time working together before they understand each other’s viewpoints better.
(There are techniques to check how deeply the team has understood what to do and why. Let me know if you’d be interested in a post on those.)
Anyway, I stand by this:
A meeting is good for figuring out the context behind actions
When you all understand the context — what the action is looking to achieve and how to do it best — your action will achieve more done. More result for less effort all round. Even if it does require some more direct human interaction.
Does every action need a meeting? Not at all. Wherever the context is clearer already, and communication is more like just “passing on information”, that makes for a boring meeting that could really be an email.
Do you need to point people to some mandatory training, or give a simple procedure, or update them on an event? Just stick to text, at least at first. If tricky questions come up, then you could meet about it.
Airing tricky questions and concerns — that’s something that group meetings are good for. A team may have feelings and fears that are hard to put in text, or even seem risky to bring up.
Perhaps it is a new policy that has them worried, or some business news, or some offhand comment you made and didn’t really think about.
It could also very well be a disagreement about the way to perform an action, after the initial briefing sank in. Perhaps the action would bring the team into conflict with others. Or it doesn’t seem to tie with other things they need to do. Or it is a worthy action that nevertheless won’t pan out in practice. Or, in some way it seems to threaten the team’s survival**.
This can be a great thing to air in a meeting. You may not look forward to a meeting like that (and actually your team may be even more nervous), but if you hear out the viewpoints successfully, it really helps you work together.
t’s so much better that your team air their concerns rather than burying them. Better emotionally and also practically: so the right things get done in the right way, for the right reasons.
So:
A meeting is for understanding the viewpoints of the people in it
In a meeting like that, your first task as a leader is to listen. Not just to look and sound like you’re listening, but to prove that you are hearing what the team means.
There are some techniques and common mistakes when it comes to listening in meetings — I’ll talk about them in another post. But for now, two things you should do, and two you shouldn’t:
Do make sure you hear the main viewpoints. If someone seems to be sitting on a thought, gently ask them about it.
Don’t feel you have to go round every person in the room mechanically, asking each one in turn “What do you think?” It can waste time, especially if the person who always has to say something in a meeting is not the one with the main point. (Those delicate folks at Basecamp write that meetings “often contain at least one moron that inevitably gets his turn to waste everyone’s time with nonsense”.) The important thing is to make sure that every key viewpoint is heard. If even the quietest person in the room feels that the relevant points have been heard, that could be good enough.
Do ask more questions to make sure you understand what is meant. For example, if someone says “that’s not the right way to build it”, you need to understand not only what they suggest instead, but more on why it is the right way now, for them and for you.
Don’t feel that you need to prove your listening by taking action on every point (but make sure your team understands the reason why you act or not).
More on that last point:
A great way to prove that you have really listened and heard is to do what the speaker suggests. And, provided you have the right team and situation, there will be many times when you can do this.
However, there will also be times when what they suggest is not the right thing, bearing in mind the bigger picture. Maybe there are other priorities, or things coming up that affect it, or commercial considerations.
If what your your team suggests is not the best action, you do them more favors by being honest about that. If they can trust you to be honest at that time, they also know that every time you do agree with their feedback, you really mean it. You’re not just agreeing to make them happy.
And of course, they do need to listen in return. A meeting has to be an interaction, a conversation, to be worth anything as a meeting.
Summing up
Just delivering information? Consider making it a message or a recording. And of course expect people to take that information — that’s the deal. If they want to cut down on meetings, they need to read the thing.
Feel the topic needs a conversation? Have a meeting then. Just make sure you do some actual listening. (And avoid posting about it on Reddit.)
* “It’s a trap!” I can almost hear a Redditor saying. In the thread I linked, commenters were suspicious of meetings because a manager might say one thing in the meeting, and later claim they didn’t. Emails at least would leave proof.
That lack of trust will stop anything useful getting done. For sure, it is good to keep notes of decisions after a meeting. But even more important to not be the kind of boss who generates that kind of fear. And if team members had such a boss before, and fear the same for you? All the more important to prove to them that you are fair and consistent, and most of all, honest about your own mistakes.
** In his book “Under the Hood”, Stan Slap describes employee culture as a living organism, one that cares primarily about its own survival. Sounds bleak? The good thing is that once you understand this and how to work with it, you finally get happier and more productive employees. See Cedric Chin’s great summary of Under the Hood.
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