Do your employees complain about meetings? Have you tried introducing policies or technology to make meetings more effective, only to see bad habits and overloaded calendars quickly return? If so, your colleagues may be trapped by three common limiting beliefs – mental barriers that keep them from realizing the true potential of well-coordinated gatherings.
They may believe that:
Meetings suck. All efforts at improvement are doomed.
Not my place. Only "leaders" have the authority (and responsibility) to improve meetings. I don't want to rock the boat.
It can't be done. It's not possible for meetings to work well across an entire organization.
It's incredibly difficult to inspire positive results when you start with a negative belief. This challenge holds true for each of us individually and is magnified when a limiting belief is shared by a group.
In this article, we will explore three strategies to break through these harmful meeting myths.
A lot of people come to me for advice. And sometimes, when I listen to myself talking, I wish I could follow some of it. ~ Shah Rukh Khan (aka SRK) in an interview with David Letterman
In 2022, we posted a survey asking people for five obvious tips for running better meetings. To reinforce the "obvious" bit, here's what we asked:
Imagine that you’ve agreed to help a child with a short school paper on the “Top Five Things Every Professional Needs to Know about Running Productive Meetings”. Which Top Five tips would you include?
We asked because there's a standard set of meeting tips that are shared so often and in so many places that it seems most people must have seen them. We believe people already know what they're "supposed" to do. They just aren't consistently doing it.
We received over 400 tips. Five common themes emerged.
Five Obvious Tips Every Professional Should Know About Running Productive Meetings
Have a clear objective and purpose for the meeting.
Prepare an agenda and circulate it in advance to all attendees.
Determine if a meeting is necessary before scheduling one and invite only relevant people.
Ensure active participation and engagement from all attendees and keep the meeting focused on the agenda and the desired outcomes.
End on time, recap action items and follow up with attendees afterward.
Oh good! We're not imagining things. People really do seem to know the basic advice.
They should! These tips are not new. The oldest meeting manual on my bookshelves includes these tips. It was first printed in 1897. So heads up bloggers of the world: You can write more interesting articles now! This one's been done.
The working world largely agrees on what makes meetings productive. The basic advice hasn't changed much in over 1000 years. You'd think we'd have it down by now, but we all know that's not the case.
We know there's a gap between the advice people give and what they do themselves. SRK is not alone in this. To see how big that gap might be, our survey asked two follow-up questions. The first:
In your current organization, what percentage of meetings do you believe follow this Top 5 advice?
The average responses?
45% for all meetings across the organization
67% of the meetings led by the respondent
44.57% for all meetings, 67.2% of my meetings work great!
These numbers are disturbing low because our surveys tend to attract lots of meeting experts. In this case, 74% of the people taking the survey said that they're most often in the role of a senior executive, leader, or outside expert.
If these leaders aren't consistently following this advice, is anyone? Short answer: Yes.
Averages can be deceiving. When we look at the range of answers, you can see that 17% estimated that more than 75% of their organization's meetings consistently followed this "obvious" advice.
17% say 76 to 100% of their meetings rock it!
That's actually a bit lower than I expected based on the sample and our pre-pandemic research (see this, and this), but it's still leagues beyond impossible.
Once again, it is possible for organizations to enjoy consistently effective meetings.
Still, this leaves us with a significant gap between what most people supposedly know and what they do.
Why the gap? What's getting in the way?
The Gap Between Knowing What to Do and Doing It
Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right.
— Henry Ford
For years, I believed the issue was ignorance. I thought folks must endure lousy meetings because they didn't know any better!
While this may be true for some junior employees, I no longer think ignorance is at the core. As the top-tip advice demonstrated, most people say reasonable things when asked to list five obvious tips for running better meetings. I've asked children, strangers on the bus, people at networking events, and laborers who rarely go to meetings, and they all offer decent-sounding advice.
The basic knowledge is out there, yet the chasm between knowing and doing persists. Many people know what they should be doing, but they aren't doing it.
We asked our survey respondents about what they believe creates that gap in their organizations. Specifically:
Thinking about your organization and these Top 5 tips, if meetings do not consistently follow these tips, why might that be?
Here are the top themes.
Lack of buy-in from attendees and leadership.
A lack of clear guidelines and training.
Other people fail to prepare, follow through, or set a clear purpose and agenda, leading to low-quality outcomes.
A general lack of motivation towards meetings.
Short version: Other people!
This will not surprise the psychologists amongst you. Humans are susceptible to a "blindspot" that suggests any failure on our part is due to uncontrollable circumstances. Our meetings are great – except maybe not perfect when we're too busy, stressed, tired, or otherwise thwarted by understandable obstacles.
At the same time, we may believe other people fail because they're lazy, selfish, unintelligent, controlling, or mean – and sometimes all of the above!
When people in an organization experience chronic meeting pain, they witness other people behaving in less-than-awesome ways. This seeds three powerful limiting beliefs.
Three Limiting Beliefs About Business Meetings
1. Meetings suck. Full stop.
As in, water is wet.
Many people seem to believe that bad meetings are in our nature – just a fact of life akin to gravity and death, and their curiosity stops there.
A survey answer reflecting this belief:
Many MANY supervisors who lead meetings apparently have never been told how to lead them well, never had formal training, or – as poor-participants themselves – they allow or participate in these things as leaders. Many leaders seem to fall into these habits because it is COMFORTABLE.
For example, they'll have a triangulated discussion with 2-3 other people out of a group of 20-50 because they don't feel able to address a bigger group, or they'll fail to ask for input since they feel comfortable with their idea and don't want it questioned or changed.
They've never been told how to lead meetings well?!?!?
Why are people waiting around for someone to tell them how to spend their own time more productively? We are a society that can find a great restaurant in a foreign city in minutes. But we don't expect meeting leaders to Google "how to make meetings better?"
That's ridiculous. The information isn't hard to find for anyone who looks. The trick is, they have to believe better meetings just might be possible before they'll get curious enough.
This limiting belief also manifests as:
We're cancelling all our internal meetings so we can get work done.
If you believe that meeting is the opposite of doing work and that meetings are by nature bad things, then the only sensible response is to eliminate as many meetings as you can.
Leaders who embraced the "meetings suck" belief at Shopify, Salesforce, Nike, Slack, and many other companies could then play the hero by dramatically canceling all those evil meetings and rescuing their employees' calendars.
Of course, since meetings are often useful and necessary, employee calendars quickly fill up again. Like Sisyphus, those heroes never achieve the victory they seek.
Every day, valiantly clearing meetings off the calendar
The belief that "Meetings Suck" traps people in bad meeting cultures because it kills curiosity. It assumes that better meetings don't exist, so there's no reason to pursue them.
You and I know better. We know that not all meetings suck. Actually, lots of people know this. Lots of these people even know what an effective meeting looks and feels like.
Despite knowing better, however, folks may endure regularly awful meetings because they believe...
2. It's not my place to make a change.
We learn what's acceptable in a group by attending that group's meetings. If the people in charge do a poor job of it, they're unlikely to know how others feel unless they specifically ask.
Here's a survey response demonstrating the "not my place" belief in action:
We are too nice to one another and don't hold each other accountable for eliciting meeting behavior etiquette, even after its discussed at company meetings.
I encountered this belief most forcefully when leading a private workshop. The company's management brought me in to help their project leaders improve the meetings in the project lifecycle. As we neared the end of a workshop, one frustrated project manager burst out:
I don't understand why we're doing this! Sure, I'd love to run my meetings the way we learned here, but that's not how we do it at this company! If leadership wanted us to run better meetings, they'd tell us – but I haven't heard anything from them about this.
Without a leadership mandate, nothing will change. We're wasting our time.
I was stunned. First, because the leadership group hired me to help them, I wondered – what more of a "mandate" did they need?!
More importantly, this statement revealed a belief that the meetings were bad at the company because that's how leadership wanted them to be, and if they wanted a change, they'd say so. It wasn't the project teams' place to say otherwise.
The belief that it's not my place to make a change traps people in bad meeting habits (and many more ineffective habits) because it reflects a culture where people feel that it's unsafe to suggest improvements.
Those project leaders knew their meetings were boring and knew exactly how to improve them, but they wouldn't try because they didn't believe they had the authority.
So, does that mean people who know how to lead great meetings and clearly have the authority to do so have it easy?
Not necessarily. They may be prone to the third limiting belief.
3. It's not possible for meetings to work well across an entire organization.
Senior leaders – think COOs, CMOs, & SVPs – who lead highly effective meetings within their departments know that they can create a great team culture.
Still, they may not believe it's possible to spread these good habits to other parts of the organization.
Sometimes, this belief has to do with the person at the top.
We have a CEO with narcissistic tendencies who has no goal-awareness and has never worked in a disciplined organization. Rambling and mental frolics are common.
Apparently, this is how Midjourney thinks a CEO prone to "mental frolics" behaves. No wonder they have meeting problems!
More often, though, this belief reflects the experience of a leader who has never worked in an organization with healthy meeting habits. They don't believe organization-wide effectiveness is possible because they've never seen it.
They lack vision.
This belief keeps them trapped in an environment where the only quality meetings they can rely on are the ones they control. They stay mute when they see other leaders operating ineffectively, leaving everyone else free to squander the company's time.
Liberating Limiting Beliefs
If you're trying to improve your organization's meeting culture, you will encounter these beliefs and they will impede your progress.
People who don't believe that meetings can be great will never prioritize improving them. You must shift these beliefs to make progress.
Happily, you can. We'll explore a few strategies you can start with in a future article.
Two people sit mostly naked in the snow, breathing deeply. They remain quiet and still for a long time.
At least it feels like a long time to one of them. The other –
a more advanced student – rests in comfortable contemplation, focusing deeply on sending healing energy throughout his body.
The first one wants to send healing to his body, too. If only it wasn't so damn cold! As the minutes pass, he begins to fear that bits of him must surely be freezing off. His anxiety escalates until he feels compelled to flee for the warm cabin.
An outside observer would say that these two men shared the same experience. But really, their individual feelings about the time they spent couldn't be more different.
One experienced a tortuous ordeal.
The other experienced a nourishing moment of calm.
Now, I'm curious: have you noticed that a growing number of companies are trying to solve their crushing meeting load by canceling them?
All of them.
For some, thisinterventionprovides a much-needed break and the time they needed to redesign a more thoughtful approach. See the HBR articleMeeting Overload is a Fixable Problemby Rebecca Hinds and Bob Sutton for an example.
For others, their calendars quickly fill back up, just like a trash heap in the belly of a starship.
That's because interventions like these don't address the root causes of ineffective meetings. We've found that there are three underlying root cause problems that lead to chronically bad meetings.
It looks to me like we've broken work. Not for everyone, and not everywhere, but for a lot of teams the WE part of work isn't working.
I know. This isn't new.
Work has been kinda broken for a lot of people for a long time. But take it from a lady who deploys lots of duct tape and safety pins: there's a big difference between kinda broken and all-the-way broken.
The lockdowns broke office work. They forced many people out of jobs, and many more into isolation in an attempt to protect our communities. Even though we went through this experience together, we experienced it alone. We were forced to craft a way of working that was uniquely tailored to our individual circumstances. As "3 weeks to flatten the curve" morphed into multiple years with an ever-shifting end goal, we developed new habits.
This is a popular search. For those of you building infographics and reports and term papers, here's the bottom line up front.
Our 2022 best-guess estimates for the number of meetings per day in the US:
1976: 11 million
2015: 55 million
2020 lockdown: 80+ million
2022: 62 to 80 million
For everyone else, read on to understand where these numbers come from, why they're irrelevant for most people, and when (or if) you should care about the number of meetings in your organization.
Before that, there wasn't much need. Horses rarely ran into each other, and most people traveled by foot. There were no speed limits, no lane markings, no directional signage, and few street name signs. Traffic control was not a thing.
The first stop sign was an intervention. More cars led to more accidents, and something had to be done.
Since then, our understanding of how to manage traffic has evolved. Today, the stop sign is one of many internationally recognized signals. We enjoy sophisticated, continually evolving systems for routing traffic.
Left: The first stop sign was installed in Detroit, Michigan.
Source Right: Traffic control on SW Moody in Portland, OR in 2020
Source
Like rapid travel, meetings used to be an infrequent activity. Courtiers, guild masters, and bishops met. Everyone else went about their business with no need to draft an agenda or call anyone to order.
“Let’s have one or two guild meetings this year.
50% business, 50% ritualized drinking, of course. All in favor?”
Image Source
While the 20th century saw a rise in the management class, it wasn't until the 1980s that most of the workforce held jobs that required regular meetings.
As the percentage of people in manufacturing and agriculture declines, the percentage attending regular meetings increases.
Source
Still, there wasn't too much traffic running through the conference room. Most companies shared a few meeting tips with leaders, then expected everyone to work it out.
Then the 2020 lockdowns arrived, and meeting traffic exploded. Calendars became gridlocked with overlapping, back-to-back video conferences. Software that analyzes calendar data saw increases in meeting time ranging from 13-148% (Sources: National Bureau of Economic Research, Microsoft). So many meetings!
Two years later, employees everywhere are crashing and burning out from sitting in endless meeting traffic jams.
Screenshot from a real calendar, blurred for privacy. This person contacted support hoping for an easier way to figure out which meeting to attend when he was invited to several at once.
The Great Resignation is hitting some companies harder than others. Companies with a well-designed Meeting Operating System - a system that directs meeting activity to ensure meetings flow effectively and efficiently - enjoy calendars that look a lot like they did before the lockdown. Those embracing asynchronous communications have even more time free for other work.
Many teams endure too much time wasted in unproductive meetings. I am increasingly convinced that this is not due to a lack of knowledge.
Want to help me test this hypothesis? Take our short survey and share it with your peers!
We are awash in information about How to plan and run productive meetings. We have centuries of useful tips and multiple professions full of people who know how to structure and lead a productive meeting to draw upon.
I believe instead that those ineffective meetings are a systemic issue. If leaders really wanted to address their meeting problems, they could - but they don't.
Something gets in the way. That something is baked into the team culture. It's the
"how things get done around here." It's a system that has no allowance for making changes to meetings.
Of course, the company handbook doesn't decree that "Thou shalt run soul-sucking meetings." If the meetings are bad and we're not talking about the meetings, then that's a shadow system. Shadow systems are full of unwritten rules, workarounds, and habits governing how people interact. Part ingenuity, part social conformity, and a whole bunch of just not looking too closely because we have other priorities right now thank you very much.
Want to quickly make an enormous impact on the meetings in your organization? Roll out an effective strategy for your Team Cadence and Progress Check meetings.
Too much time wasted in unproductive meetings. Meeting overload. Zoom fatigue. Article after article decries the plague of too many meetings gobbling up our time.
Looking for data about how awful this problem is and some recycled quick tips?
No problem! These are just a few of the articles published on this topic in the past few months.
If we’re all so busy, why isn’t anything getting done? (Jan 10, McKinsey)
The articles keep coming, but the challenge persists.
One reason: these complaints don't actually apply to all meetings. People are not upset that they spend too much time meeting with clients, or have too many solution design sessions.
The problem is all the status meetings, the team meetings, and the ad-hoc "synch-ups", "check-ins", and "touch-bases" that drag teams down.
Last week's invasion of Ukraine resurfaced this conversation. Looking back, the Notre Dame fire seems merely unfortunate in comparison to the events of the past several years. We've been bombarded by tragedies, and many teams have developed better ways of processing these events together.
Even still - when new events unfold, we need to decide: What should we do in our upcoming meetings?
Should we begin by acknowledging what's happening, even though most meetings deal with entirely unrelated topics? And how can you NOT talk about it?
As a meeting leader, you may feel it's important to address something that you believe is or should be on everyone's mind before diving into your agenda.
You might be right, You might also be making an assumption that could derail your meeting.
I enjoy planning meetings. I also enjoy large, easy jigsaw puzzles.
I love it when a successful plan comes together!
When you know the basic shape you’re going for, and you have a bunch of the pieces handy, it can be quite satisfying to get them to all fit together into a nice, coherent picture. With a jigsaw puzzle, it’s very clear that the value is in the activity itself. People who puzzle do so because they enjoy spending their time figuring it out—not because they’re genuinely curious about what the end picture might be.
Like the picture you see when you finish a jigsaw puzzle, most of the plans you get at the end of a planning meeting aren’t really meant to last.
Meeting overload, zoom fatigue, and too much time wasted in unproductive meetings: these problems grow during periods of rapid change. Bad meetings proliferate when we struggle to communicate well. And when things change rapidly, we need to share more information more often to keep on top of the situation.
According to a 2013 study by PMI, $75 million for every $1 billion spent on projects is put at risk by ineffective communications. (source)
Remember 2013? Looking back, those seem like such simple times! How much more money do you imagine we're losing now, after two years of constant uncertainty? If we struggled to share information effectively back then, it's no wonder that today's meeting madness has become so overwhelming.
Now imagine, what else might we accomplish if we could redirect those wasted funds (and time and energy) towards achieving some worthwhile goals?
John Antill works as a U.S. Army Expeditionary Civilian Workforce Knowledge Manager. In his pursuit of a Master's Degree at Kent State University, he decided to map the flow of information while working as the Knowledge Manager for Army Joint Force Headquarters Cyber using the military's Operational Management Rhythm approach. He focused specifically on the meetings, or meeting flow models, asking:
Which meetings are we running now? What's their purpose?
How are these meetings intended to fit into the larger information flow?
Is the necessary information reaching the right people at the right time?
Where are the gaps? Where are the redundancies?
How might we re-work our meetings to better achieve our objectives?
When he was done, the Army worked to implement his suggestions. Early results include:
105 staff hours per week saved by redesigning one meeting A 30-person weekly meeting that had run four hours each week was reduced to 30 minutes.
70% fewer meetings 178 regularly scheduled meetings involving multiple groups reduced to 55
Radically increased workforce adaptability The inter-department meeting schedule for a 4-Star Command, including meetings that coordinate the work of nearly 1.5 million people, was successfully shifted to adapt to the Covid-19 lockdown in a matter of weeks.
Right now, many teams are dealing with massive turnover. Reports on the "Turnover Tsunami" and "The Great Resignation" reveal staggering volatility across industries and countries. Have you driven past the restaurants in your area recently? If so, you've seen the desperate billboards advertising hiring bonuses, increased wages, and pleading with customers to forgive their limited services.
It's not just the restaurants, as seen in this text message.
Why is this happening? Lots of reasons.
According to Gallup, it may have nothing to do with the organization, the manager, or the team; this is part of what happens when major events force people to re-evaluate their life choices. Normally, major events like graduations, marriages, births, and deaths are infrequent and sprinkled randomly across the workforce. During these last 18 months, every single person experienced a major life event all at once. Everyone is re-evaluating their life choices, and a lot of them are deciding it's time for a change.
In short, it may not be about you right now.
Of course, if your whole team just quit, it might be entirely about you. Your company might be a terrible place to work. You might be an awful manager. Gallup also says that the Great Resignation is made worse by a pervasive Great Discontent.
Whatever the reason, labor shortages are making it hard to get work done.
The cascading failures are unraveling the supply chain. Whole teams are walking away from complicated systems, leaving their replacements with no one to tell them how it all works. This makes the new jobs especially difficult because customers haven't relaxed their expectations. Kindness, unfortunately, is not as contagious as Covid-19.
While many are leaving their jobs, it's likely that boredom, loneliness, or finances will drive them into new jobs soon.
What does this mean for employers and people leaders?
You don't necessarily need an agenda to have a great meeting.
I'm pretty sure you knew that already.
I'm guessing you've attended many useful and interesting meetings that lacked an agenda. I bet that when someone tells you "No agenda, no attenda!" you feel chastened, but also a bit annoyed by this demand for what feels like busy work. Short, purposeful meetings simply don't need an agenda.
Every meeting, though, should have a clear purpose. Why does this group need to spend this time together?
Leaders around the world have a lazy habit of adding meetings to the calendar without making it clear why that meeting needs to happen. As Doodle reported in a 2019 study of over 10 million meetings:
Most organizations host regular meetings involving everyone on their teams. These meetings go by many names: all-hands, all-staff, all teams, town halls, business update meetings, Teatime, TGIF, and more. This form of meeting, where you gather everyone in your tribe at the same time, is thousands of years old and practiced by every kind of group. Unfortunately, none of these names provide much guidance about how to make these meetings worthwhile.
Like every meeting, the key to a great all-hands meeting is to clearly define the purpose and intended outcomes in advance. Why do you host these meetings? What should be different afterward as a result?
"All Hands" just describes the attendee list.
I've been asked how to improve all-hands meetings by several clients over the years. In this article, I've pulled together all those separate bits of advice in one place.
I've been thinking a lot about how some teams are designed to operate with uncertainty, but most are not.
The teams that operate in uncertain conditions never know what they'll face when they show up to work. Firefighters, athletes, investigators: they can't plan what will happen each day. Instead, they develop skills for performing in a variety of situations, tools for assessing the situation they find themselves in, and then respond with their best guess at what they believe will work in the moment.
If the first attempt doesn't work, then they update their thinking, make a new decision, and try something else.
Right now, there's a lot of uncertainty surrounding the return to the workplace. Should we try to get everyone back into the office? If so, when? Or how often?
Then we'll never hear the end of it. Our teams will probably tell us all the ways our decisions are wrong if we ask. Or if we don't, they'll just leave.
"How can we reduce the time we're spending in meetings?"
I used to love it when clients asked me this, because wow - what a softball! This is easy math. To reduce time wasted in unproductive meetings, you can:
Cancel meetings. Look for any meeting that lacks a clear purpose or goals, and get rid of it.
Shorten meetings. Whack 10 minutes off of every recurring meeting on your calendar, and stick to the new time limit.
Invite fewer people. Eliminate meeting time for those people, who probably have better things to do anyway.
Assign a timekeeper. This increases your team's awareness of time passing in the meeting and your odds of ending on time or early.
Here's a quicky video summing up these easy-math tips.
But do these simple answers help the smart professionals asking this question?
No.
Of course not, because this isn't really a math question.
This is a question about how to change a team's meeting culture.
So let's talk about those things you need to do to run great everyday business meetings with your teams. And yes, I'm going to share some guidelines you may already know.
Hopefully, you'll be inspired to follow them.
It's worth the effort. The leaders we've met who follow these "rules" enjoy more productivity, more loyalty, more engagement, better decision making, and less BS drama between team members than everyone else. And frankly, none of this is actually that hard to do.
Here are five rules for team meetings that I share with my business clients, and that I wish someone had taught me when I started my business.
