Meetings: hours wasted and minutes taken.
The following article by Aziza Green. Yes, she’s my wife, and yes, she’s brilliant.
We get super passionate about obscure and nerdy things sometimes. We come up with business ideas, strategies and plans every other day. This possibly reflects some chemical imbalances we share, or it could be genius in its purest form. (I’ll let you judge that).
So yes, the other day, we were obsessing over and sharing funny / horror stories about meetings we’ve been subjected to in our professional and private lives. From the old uni days, where we sat in customer service staff meetings under self-important retail middle managers, to teacher staff meetings. From small business meetings with 4-7 teamsters involving a lot of swearing to corporate marketing meetings with 40+ unit and department marketing managers and officers. Sprinkle that with everything from event planning to culture-setting meetings in church and volunteer organisations, and we’ve seen the gamut of the microcosm that is “the meeting”.
Some meetings can be so empowering, liberating and energising. When the ideas are flowing, the enthusiasm is intoxicating and there is a sense of buy-in and “team”, it is like a productivity crack.
But let’s be honest for a minute and admit that 90% of meetings… no 95.5% of meetings (clearly, these are numbers I’ve pulled out of thin air – I’m more philosopher than a statistician, after all) are boring, painful, unproductive and soul destroying.
So we’ve decided that if we ever got to be in charge of anything or anyone, we would design the meeting of our dreams for our organisations. And because we like you, we’ve decided to share our grand design.
Ahem.
The DREAM meeting:
First order of business. Organise a huge meeting with one agenda, ensure everyone knows their job for the next month and cancel all meetings. (Breathe it in.) If the need to meet arises, the “organiser” (the person who feels the need to organise the meeting) must submit a clear agenda for their meeting to the group. The group's members may contribute to the agenda, but it must be circulated before the meeting.
The agenda must have no more than five points. Why five? Because we like the number five. It’s cute. 5. What do you give someone a high five when they’ve done a great job? Not a high seven; that would be stupid. We have five senses. There are five vowels, and who doesn’t love vowels? (Anyone who thinks “Y” is now a vowel deserves a slap with seven fingers.) We never remember anything after the fifth point. Do you know what numbers are cuter than five, one through four? Those are also good numbers of points to make for an agenda. Over five, and you’re overweight and dead to us.
All team meetings should be a high five when they’ve done a great job and be capped at 25 minutes as the ideal, or up to one hour max. We get that some meetings – particularly creative or culture-building ones (or ones involving large groups) may require more flexibility and breathing room for discussion and collaboration. These meetings should be the exception and not the rule – more of your monthly rather than weekly deal. So if you must run a longer-than-usual team meeting, break the meeting into shorter blocks to deal with one issue at a time and then move on. If you can’t communicate something, figure out a problem or develop ideas in the time allocated. You haven’t thought about the problem enough, so you do not have the adequate thinking or tools to address or fix it appropriately. Return to the drawing board when you have something more solid. Which brings us to our:
Golden rule: You are not welcome to the meeting (even if, not especially if, you organised it) if you do not have a clear idea of what you want to contribute to the meeting and the team. Stay away if you have nothing to contribute and no one has explicitly asked for you to contribute. If you organise a meeting and do not have clear ideas to bring to the table, we will kick you out of it and treat it to a lovely little coffee break to which you are not invited.
Every meeting must end with clear and practical ACTION POINTS. Every person in the meeting must leave the room with a clear idea of what is required of them. Time must be allocated to ensure everyone knows what to do next. If you organise a meeting with no action points at the end, you are buying everyone coffee for the rest of the week. (Rules require consequences, people!)
5. b. This is not a point; it is more of an aside to say asides are NOT allowed. And also, how cute do 5 points look? Awww!
Respect the agenda and protect the time. Train one another to stay on point and not wander into “soapbox” territory, which typically diverts the focus of the meeting and bores everyone to tears. Encourage one another to speak about their gripes in constructive and appropriate private forums rather than abusing the public forum of team meetings.
Brilliant! (or crazy?) If you get to have any influence on the meetings you sit in, maybe you could experiment with some or all of our points. If you don’t influence the overall culture of your team meetings, we encourage you to focus on what you can do: implement some of these points in your practice.
If you realise you are one of those people who use team meetings to bang on your agendas, it’s time to change your awful ways. Pay attention to the attention span of others and find better (less passive-aggressive) ways to resolve your issues. If you get to run the occasional meeting or part thereof, be organised, submit an agenda, think through your points and be succinct. Even if no one says anything, EVERYONE will love you for it! Maybe if you do this consistently, it may even catch on.
We left out some other stuff from our fantasy meeting, such as the Butler named Jasper, who always has our Earl Grey tea ready in our favourite cups, the pinball machine, and the walls lined with butcher paper and a million coloured pens…. But I want to know what your dream meeting would look like.