Repeat after me: “Meetings are work” | Working Principles

It’s a work morning and I open my calendar to see what the day has in store for me. It’s heavily littered with meetings, and I wonder to myself “when am I supposed to get some work done?”

Later on that day a meeting, amazingly, finishes early and I quietly vocalize to myself “Great, now I can get some work done.” I look down at my list of tasks and realise that my brain is too addled to be able to get anything constructive done in the fifteen minutes that I have.

I’m not a fan of meetings, perhaps you already guessed, I’m in good company:

Meetings are by definition a concession to deficient organization. For one either meets or one works.

Peter Drucker

A committee is an animal with four back legs.

John le Carre

If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be ‘meetings.’

Dave Barry

I’ve searched all the parks in all the cities – and found no statues of Committees.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

What is it about meetings that make us feel this way? Why doesn’t a gathering of people around a subject make us feel fulfilled, energised? Why would I rather be writing a document?

What is it that is so broken here?

Is it the way that meetings are run that is broken? Or perhaps it’s my attitude, others appear to have an enthusiasm for gatherings that I can’t muster? Or maybe it’s a collective problem that we all need to own our part of?

Let’s take a look at a few more quotes:

“The magic to a great meeting is all of the work that’s done beforehand.”

Bill Russell

Let’s start by thinking about the work that happens before a meeting.

Most of us can tell when someone is winging it and most of us are rightly frustrated by those meetings where a lack of preparation wastes everyone’s time.

So many good meetings are created in the hours before the session.

I’m currently doing a series of meetings which are really training sessions. These meetings are being recorded because we expect people to go back over the content which is motivating us to be prepared.

Those meetings feel so rich.

“If we have a clear agenda in advance, and we are fully present and fully contributing, the meetings do go much faster.”

Unknown

We live in a very distracted world and no more so than at work. We apply half our attntion to many virtual meetings and the result is that things that could happen in ten minutes take twenty, thirty, forty minutes.

Despite what you think, you are not enabled for multi-tasking.

I hope that’s we’ve all attended meetings where we’ve been in the zone, fully present, and felt the exhilaration of getting something done that perhaps you didn’t think could be done, or would take a long time to get done.

“The longer the meeting, the less is accomplished.”

Tim Cook

In our virtual working world it’s so easy for people to call a meeting and pick the length. It’s a truism to say that the time taken for a meeting grows to meet the time available. How many 1 hour meetings should have been 30 minutes? How many 30 minute meeting should have been an email? Meetings rarely finish early while I’m sure much of that is to do with people’s attention to the meeting sometimes it was just poor meeting management.

I’ve worked internationally for over 30 years and have learnt to recognise that timekeeping differs around the world. There are some cultures where time appears to be more liquid than we expect in the UK.

In every organisation there are individuals that have their own view on the meaning of an hour and a minute. I make no apology for my reputation as a fierce timekeeper. Far too many meetings have all of the energy sucked out of them by the weight of time.

The thing that is regularly going through my head in these situations is the cost-benefit analysis of the meeting. Yet, there are times when I come out of a meeting and know that the value of the gathering was way higher than the hours spent, that things were achieved that would have taken days to get done in any other way.

“Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people.”

Steve Jobs

This is the reality of business, it’s about the team and teams need to communicate. We have many different ways of communicating but nothing comes close to the meeting. While so many meetings are frustrating, time-wasting, energy sapping, distracted, sinkholes for precious, never to be recovered, minutes there really is no replacement for them. When they are well-prepared, engaging, focussed, enlightening gatherings they can be magical places where real work gets done.

I am trying to change my attitude and to remind myself that meetings are work – but I have a long way to go.

Header Image: This is a sculpture called the The Praying Shell which overlooks Morecambe Bay near to where 23 Chinese cockle pickers tragicly died in 2004. The sculpture was envisioned before the tragedy it’s become something of a symbol for it.