To meet or not to meet, begs a question
One either meets or one works. One cannot do both at the same time.” That was the late management writer Peter Drucker’s frequently quoted verdict on meetings.
There is a dated feel to Drucker’s meeting-bashing. He assumed those doing the meeting would be men: in an ideal world, he said, there would be no need for meetings because everybody would “know what he needs to know to do his job”.
There is also a sense of the organisations he described being static. People had welldefined roles. “We meet because people holding different jobs have to co-operate to get a specific task done.”
But while today’s organisations may be more fluid, with constantly changing job titles and the dissolving and reforming of teams, we can still all recognise this from Drucker: “An organisation in which everyone meets all the time is an organisation in which no one gets anything done.”
Many modern companies do things rather than make them. It is often hard to tell what it is that they do. If you observed their daily activities you would conclude that what they do is have meetings.
Some recognise that this is a problem. They have developed strategies for keeping meetings short, such as insisting that people have them standing up.
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, which does make things, told his employees to walk out of a meeting as soon as it was clear they had nothing to add. “It is not rude to leave, it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time,” he e-mailed his staff.
Most employees do not have permission to walk out of meetings. They have to go when they are summoned. The fault lies with those with the power to call meetings. They are the ones who can stop wasting people’s time.
So what should the modern rule for calling meetings be? You should call a meeting only if it has a question before it and the meeting can answer the question.
Our contract with Prismatic Rapture ends in March. Who do we need to speak to and what do we need to do to ensure they renew it? That is a question that a meeting can answer.
Getting the team together every Monday morning has a point if the question is “what did we do last week and what do we need to do this week?”, but not if its purpose is for whoever called the meeting to make some announcements. She or he can do that on WhatsApp.
Meetings that take place standing up should not be happening. If there is a question to answer, everyone needs to give it proper consideration, which means they need to sit down. If the idea is to rush away as soon as possible there probably isn’t a question to answer, or a point to the meeting.
Once you have called the meeting with a question to answer, who should attend? Those who can answer the question. They may not be the most obvious or the most senior. Ask around.
Once the meeting starts, how should you run it? First, pose the question. Then keep quiet. I once wrote that when I ran departments I used to write SU at the top of my notepad at the start of every meeting. It stood for “shut up”. A reader emailed that the proper modern abbreviation is STFU.
You want to hear what everyone else has to say. Let them speak. Encourage the quiet ones to speak too. Then ask questions about what they say. When everyone has spoken, summarise the main thoughts. Do this fairly, regardless of what you think of the views. People want to know they have been listened to.
Then make a decision, judge the consensus or vote, depending on the culture of the organisation, and decide who has to take what action. Agree on how this is going to be reported back. This does not have to be at another meeting.
Every now and then, review how much of people’s time has been spent in meetings. Drucker’s measure is still about right. If people spend more than a quarter of their time in meetings, he said, “that is timewasting malorganisation”.
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