Please Don’t Kill Me
In my various roles as a staff member at the Southern California Nevada Conference and as a board member of three organization, I staff or attend more committees than I care to count. Meetings can be effective ways to collaborate, opportunities to be innovative, and reliable ways to pull a group together to solve a problem. They can also be exhausting, unproductive, frustrating drudgery!
As I consider some of the meetings I have taken part in over the past few years, one of my favorite books on the topic comes to mind: Death by Meeting, a leadership fable written by Patrick Lencioni. Lencioni is an excellent author with many best selling titles on leadership. Most of his books are written in fable which make them very easy to read. Death by Meeting is one of his longer books (260 pages) and I finished it in one sitting (not a normal reading pace for me). Here is my summary of the book. For those of you who are in meetings with me, I hope this whets your appetite.
This leadership fable describes a small software company owner, Casey McDaniel, who is challenged with an under-performing company with low morale. In an attempt to provide larger rewards to his employees, Casey allows his company to be purchased by a larger software company. This resulted in stock being distributed to the employees, gaining short term results in morale.
Now Casey reports to someone else and the pressure is on him to get things done. He is visited by a corporate officer with a tough reputation and the results put Casey under the gun. His weekly executive meetings are disturbing to the corporate man and although Casey would agree the meetings are a drudgery, he doesn’t see why they would be the cause of his job being on the line.
Casey hires a young assistant who turns out to be the answer man for Casey’s problems. After sitting in on a few of the meetings, this new assistant begins to analyze where things are going wrong and why they really matter. The young assistant gains the ears of the executive team and begins to challenge them to re-think the use of their meeting time. The end results are nothing short of a success story. Casey and his executive team learn valuable lessons about meetings that enable them to energize their company and produce the results needed to excel in their industry as well as keep Casey’s job secure.
As Casey and his executive team learned from their young assistant, there are two primary components necessary for a successful meeting. They are drama and contextual structure. Without these two components, meetings are boring, dull, ineffective and unproductive at best.
Meetings need drama! They should be interactive. A meeting should allow for interjections, comments, criticisms and challenges. At the outset, the leader of the meeting should “hook” the participants. The leader must cause the group to see the importance and urgency of the content. Giving the participants in the meeting a reason to care is vital to their active participation.
In addition to providing a reason to care the leader of a meeting must create a climate that encourages active participation. Caring alone does not result in a successful meeting. Each person must be willing to take risk and share their opinions and passions with the group. This will naturally produce conflict. Conflict is vital to a successful meeting.
It is in the free exchange of ideas, opinions and passions that the group will be given all the important and relevant information needed to make the decisions the group is discussing. After all, it is vital that everyone has the full range of knowledge available to them to make the best decisions possible. It is these decisions that affect the future of everyone in the meeting and throughout the organization.
It is vital that the leader of the meeting mine for conflict. Many people naturally will avoid conflict with their peers. They do not want to be embarrassed or embarrass others. Unfortunately without everyone’s honest and open input, no one will be able to make the best decisions. Additionally, when someone in the meeting does not voice their opinion during the meeting, they will often be resentful of the decisions made later. The leader of the meeting must facilitate this openness by ensuring that everyone is safe to voice their opinions without retaliation. The leader must also actively purse opposing views of the group members to help foster the conflict and debate.
The second component that successful meetings need is contextual structure. Casey and his team learn there are four types of meetings:
- The daily check-in meeting
- The weekly tactical meeting
- The monthly strategic meeting and the
- Quarterly off-site meeting.
Each meeting serves a different purpose and meets a different need. Choosing the wrong contextual structure for a meeting can cause the meeting to be frustrating and unproductive.
The first type of meeting is the daily check-in. This meeting is used to avoid confusion about how priorities translate into action on a daily basis. They also help eliminate unnecessary communication back and forth to coordinate schedules. These brief meetings simply allow each member to report on their activities for the day. The meeting should take no more than five minutes.
The second type of meeting is the weekly tactical meeting. This meeting can be weekly or bi-weekly and should run between 45 and 90 minutes.
The purpose of this meeting is to have regular meetings focused exclusively on tactical issues of immediate concern. These meetings should be attended by everyone. Every time.
This meeting should be disciplined and structured and contain these three elements: The Lightning Round; a quick, around-the-table reporting session in which everyone indicates their two or three priorities for the week. A Progress Review; routine reporting of critical information or metrics. Real-Time Agenda; An agenda developed on the spot as a result of the information shared in the other two components.
The third type of meeting is the monthly strategic meeting. This meeting is the one where the executives wrestle with, analyze, debate, and decide upon critical issues that will affect the business in fundamental ways. These meetings allow the executives to dive into specific issues in depth. The length of the meeting will vary in time depending on the topics being considered.
The fourth type of meeting is the quarterly off-site review. These meetings should include comprehensive strategy review, team review, personnel review, and competitive & industry review. These meetings should not overburden the participants or be over-structured.
Holding each of these types of meetings is crucial for the success of an organization. Too often, leaders spend countless hours on the phone, writing e-mails and roaming the halls to clarify what should have been made clear in the right type of meeting.
Death by Meeting
Author: Patrick Lencioni
ISBN: 0-7879-6805-6
Published 2004
Website: http://www.tablegroup.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/patricklencioni
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Patrick-Lencioni/133626265614?ref=ts&v=wall
thanks, Keith. I’ve heard of this book and been put off by the title – too close to home, I guess. But this post whet’s my appetite. It’s certainly true that there are good (engaging, productive) meetings, and the other kind. If this book can help improve those results, it’s got to be worth the read.