How much is your zombie meeting costing you?
$71,000.00. That’s the rough cost of a one hour, weekly team meeting for one year.
A wee story to begin. Last year I went to a brilliant Wankernomics performance; two excellent stand up comedians in their corporate attire, satirising the bane of corporations today: The All Hands Meeting. It was equally funny and scary in the way great satire is: scarily true.
I caught a glimpse of one of those meetings recently on a client site. It reminded me why I could never work inside an organisation again. Frankly, I’d rather listen to my kids practice the recorder than attend one of those meetings. And this got me thinking: how much did that meeting cost? So many mute people coming together - for what?
I decided to apply my question to something more manageable: the weekly team brief. It’s not off site, there is no fancy catering or exorbitant presenter fees. Just the labour cost of 5 people (let’s assume one Executive and four General Managers) sitting in a weekly one-hour team meeting over the course of a year. Yep, that’s where the $71,000 came from. I don’t want to be a pedant about the numbers as I’m sure they’re wrong. They’re definitely on the low side.
On one hand, you’re paying their salaries anyway. On the other, it begs the question: are you getting $71,000 worth of value from those meetings? I seriously doubt it. I could buy 14,244 large lattés for that, and I know which would add more tangible value to my day.
Some of the reasons for this very low return on investment are:
No-one’s done their homework. No pre-reading; no preparing their own thoughts; no considering useful questions.
The agenda, if there is one, lacks focus. Down in the weeds one minute, high level strategy the next; unrelated to the team’s key objective (oh wait, what is that again?); a regurgitation of facts rather than a discussion and resolution of issues.
One person hogs the meeting. The leader holds the power; the waffler disengages the audience; someone is tired and emotional and vents their spleen.
The purpose of the meeting is unclear. The team digresses to their own areas of interest; no-one calls out that we’re off track because no one knows what ‘on track’ looks like; we’re all here because we’ve ‘always’ had weekly meetings.
And we could go on.
Is this all sounding a bit too familiar?
Pat Lencioni, team development guru and best selling author of many books including ‘Death by Meeting’ says that as a surgeon does their work in the operating theatre, and a golfer does their work on the golf course, a leader does their work in meetings. If that’s the case, how would you feel about being judged on your leadership capability by the observation of your last weekly meeting?
If you want to transform your weekly meetings from something that should have died off long ago into one that is worth the time and cost, here are some tips to get you started:
Clarify why you’re meeting. This is a weekly tactical review of how things are progressing in the team. Strategic look ahead? Wrong meeting. Conversation between only two players at the table? Wrong meeting. Tick tacking about where you’re going to be today? Wrong meeting.
Create your agenda IN the meeting. What are the most important things that need to be discussed today? What decisions need to be made? What information needs to be clarified?
Allocate a ‘lookout’ to call out poor team behaviour. Who’s diving into the weeds? Who’s not getting to the point? Who’s off on a tangent? Who’s not listening? Who’s repeating what’s already been said?
Capture your decisions and actions. Who’s going to do what by when?
Communicate outcomes to relevant stakeholders. Who should know about this information or these decisions? Who’s going to tell them and by when?
Review how you went. What went well and what needs to be done differently next time to improve? Did we deliver $1,400.00 of value in that one hour meeting? Improve next time.
If you’re really serious about making your meetings worthy of eternal life, take a few hours to read or listen to Death by Meeting; A leadership fable about solving the most painful problem in business by Patrick Lencioni and have a crack at using the Tactical Meeting Structure.
And sing out if you need more support of the meeting magic variety - I love helping organisations banish zombie meetings for good.
