Stop Stinking Up Your Meetings

It’s a privilege to be able to slow down a little this summer with Stanford engagements breaking before the next academic year.The pause has me reflecting on Time – how we spend it and what we learn from it.

1. Stop Stinking Up Your Meetings

Recently Shopify launched a meeting cost calculator displaying price tags on meetings. Yes, meetings are expensive, especially at the executive level. I’ve heard from many leaders how meetings eat up their day and many times don’t get anywhere.

Often the discussions about how to run an effective meeting are structural in nature. Let’s determine the type of meeting, the agenda, the decision making process, etc.

This is important, yet insufficient on its own.

What I have found in my coaching practice is that one of the biggest determinants of a successful meeting is not just knowing who is in charge or “chairing” the meeting, but the mindset of this chair.

Two chief complaints I hear about executive meetings are:
1. Assertion: the chair uses the meeting to assert their opinion
2. Avoidance: the chair uses the meeting to kick the can and avoid making a decision

Either way members of the meeting leave disgruntled with some version of “well that’s an hour I’ll never get back.” In other words the meeting stunk, which can be a hit to the chair’s credibility. So this post is for you, my chairs, whether you are chairing a meeting because you volunteered or were volunteered for the role.

What’s going to gain you credibility points with meeting members is your commitment to the objective of the meeting and your finesse in helping meeting members get there. This is quite the opposite of the self-serving chair. Antony Jay, BBC executive and author of books including Corporate Man and Management and Machiavelli, wrote that the chair’s main focus “become[s] not the act of imposing his will on the group but of imposing the group’s will on any individual who is in danger of diverting or delaying the progress of the discussion and so from realizing the objective.”

So how do we support meeting members realizing the objective of the meeting?

The obvious items discussed are bookends. First is to clearly define the objective in the first place. Agenda setting. Answering the question, “What do we want (out of this meeting)?”

The other bookend is to acknowledge what we learned from the meeting and determine next steps or “the action plan”. Answering the question, “What do we do next?”

But what about the responsibilities of the chair that lie in between? Here are a few other key responsibilities of the chair role:

Clarify: any group discussion is ripe for misunderstanding and confusion. As chair, two powerful questions to deploy during a meeting can be:

• What do you mean by [x]? (to uncover assumptions that can derail the conversation)

• What’s behind [x]? (to uncover experience or facts that the contributor knows but forgot to share with the group)

This allows you to facilitate the conversation and identify more points of understanding and connection across members.

Balance: there tend to be people who speak a lot in meetings and people who speak a lot less. Your role as chair is to encourage idea sharing. That means:

• Jump in and invite: tactfully jump in when someone has gone on too long belaboring their point without sharing new data, and invite others who are more shy or more junior to contribute.

• Shut down the shut-downers: when someone has the courage to make a suggestion and another members comes in with some version of “Oh I don’t know about that,” pump the brakes and enforce the norm that all ideas are welcome.

End: “This is the song that never ends” is not what you want to come to mind with your meetings. A powerful presenter doesn’t trail off in their sentences. A powerful meeting doesn’t trail off either. Before a summary and action plan happen, the discussion has to end. The chair has to identify that end intentionally. End the meeting when:

• The members have reached an agreement

• The members have not reached an agreement because: 1) more data or people are required, 2) less people are required - and this decision can actually be taken offline and determined by a subset of the members, 3) more time is needed to digest the information.

People can smell the self-serving nature of a meeting a mile away. Leading the meeting does not mean generating the winning idea or pushing off a decision because you haven’t generated the winning idea yet. Falling into that trap will be costly, and not just for the minutes wasted. Leading the meeting means you are serving the objective of the meeting over all else and empowering the brilliant minds assembled in the room to get there.

2. Recommendation

Some of you recall that I’m a tennis player. Those who watch or play tennis know that players have a special tendency to talk to themselves on the court.

“Focus!”
“Get up to the ball!”
“That has to be the worst serve you’ve hit in your entire life”
…and so on.

As Gallwey puts it, “we like to think of ourselves as an obedient computer [that listens to verbal commands] rather than a human being.” The Inner Game illuminates how our natural learning process through experience is far more effective in improving performance than listening to verbal cues. Our natural learning process of course goes beyond the tennis court and reminds me that we learn best when we experience things for ourselves, what works and what doesn’t. I love a good framework and the clarity it provides from a jumble of data. However, the art of leadership is that we can’t spend all our time copy and pasting a framework or theory and expect it to work for us. The natural learning process is trying things on for size, noticing what feels good, observing our results without judgment, and discovering our own style of play.

3. The Goings On

Some of the small moments that stand out from these summer months:

I spent time near Sonoma with family this summer (pictured) and felt the buoyancy of floating in a warm 85 degree pool that I’d be craving after a long rainy cold winter (by CA standards). Being enveloped by warm water relaxed my senses and I noticed how peaceful I felt with familiar and loving faces lounging about the pool, each of us doing different things – reading, swimming, kicking a soccer ball, napping – but still together.

Another activity that gives me great joy is swapping food discoveries. I recently was gifted the recipe for Magnolia’s banana cream pudding, which is hugely sentimental from my days living in NYC. To my surprise, it takes minimal time to make and provides maximum yum. When I shared my creation with friends over the July 4th holiday they suggested we freeze it and eat it like ice cream. Oh ya, that was good.

Lastly, earlier this month, my husband and I got up early to watch Wimbledon. He was cheering on Ons Jabeur, and we then followed the intensity of an epic match with delicious dim sum at our favorite spot in San Francisco. He’s as curious about discovering how to become a better tennis player as he is about discovering a new dim sum dish to devour. It was an ordinary morning, sprinkled with reminders that sometimes the best way to savor the passage of time is to notice the small wonders around us.

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