1 Insight:
Meetings aren’t the problem—bad meeting management is.
Why Most Meetings Suck (and How to Fix Them)
Meetings have a reputation. And not a good one.
If you’ve ever walked out of a meeting and thought, that could’ve been an email, you’re not alone. The average employee attends 62 meetings per month, and half of those are considered a waste of time, costing U.S. companies $37 billion annually. Ouch.
But here’s the truth: meetings aren’t inherently bad. They’re led badly.
If you want to break free from the trap of bad meeting habits, you’ll need two essential ingredients most meetings are missing: drama and clear objectives. Adding these two missing ingredients will radically improve your team’s engagement and effectiveness in every meeting you lead.
The Drama You Do Want
Do you remember middle school drama? It never ended. When we talk about drama, we’re not suggesting you go back to those terrible years.
Instead, drama means constructive conflict with purpose.
Think about it. Every great story has:
- Characters (your team)
- A desire (your objective)
- A conflict (the challenge)
Too many meetings skip the conflict and go straight to bullet-point updates. No tension. No stakes.
Just a slow slide into despair for every participant.
Hollywood Knows Best
Most movies introduce conflict within the first ten minutes. That’s intentional. If there’s no conflict, people will stop watching.
Your meetings need the same urgency. Start by infusing your meetings with drama by pointing out what’s at stake if you don’t have a good meeting.
Imagine you’re responsible to lead a meeting to plan for next year’s budget. Boring, right? Not necessarily.
You could kick off the meeting by saying this: “Team, if we don’t do a good job of thinking through this budget today, we could end up underfunding major initiatives next year. That could stall our progress for months. The decisions we make in the next 90 minutes will shape the next two years. Let’s engage in this together.”
That’s not drama for drama’s sake. That’s helping your team understand why this meeting is important.
Make the Outcomes Clear
Think back to the last meeting where someone whispered, “Wait… why are we even here?”
Drama won’t help if no one knows why they’re in the meeting to begin with. Meetings that lack objectives create confusion, disengagement, and sloppy follow-through.
Every time you prepare to lead a meeting, you have two important decisions to make and communicate:
- Determine the Meeting TypeEach meeting will require different types of thinking from the participants.
- Strategic meetings require imagination and futuristic thinking.
- Tactical meetings require thoughts about actions and responsibility.
- Brainstorming meetings require creativity and ideation.
- Decision-making meetings require considering potential unintended consequences.
Too many meetings employ a mashup of these types, which creates confusion and forces people to use too many thinking styles at once. Predetermining the meeting type will also help you discern who needs to attend the meeting.
- Clarify the Objectives Up Front Every meeting feels like a waste of time when no one knows what they’re trying to accomplish. Establish clear, accomplishable objectives up front. Going back to the budget-meeting example, you could say: “We have three objectives in this meeting: (1) Look at last year’s budget to see where we got it right and where we messed up.
(2) Review our goals for next year to identify new budget line items and where we need to make changes.
(3) Assign actions for any research that needs to be done before next week’s follow up meeting.
Not only does this set expectations, it gives your team a built-in scoreboard. You can close the meeting by asking, “Did we meet our three objectives?” If yes, celebrate. If no, take a few minutes to wrap up what’s left.
Unleashed Leadership Connection
In our upcoming book, Unleashed Leadership, we share seven leadership traits that solve 95% of company challenges: Character, Competence, Capacity, Clarity, Community, Culture, and Consistency.
Meeting management touches on most of these traits:
- It’s one of the most important Competencies because you will lead many meetings.
- Leading meetings well creates Consistency. People will know what to expect when they walk into a meeting.
- Good meetings:
- Create Clarity around priorities, projects, and plans.
- Strengthen Community as people collaborate together and develop trust.
- Reinforce Culture with meeting behaviors that align with company values.
Good meetings do so much more. They save valuable resources, increase engagement, and speed up decision-making.
Stop wasting time on bad meetings. Start unleashing your meetings.
1 Action:
Before your next meeting, identify the real conflict worth wrestling with and write down three clear objectives. Share them with your team at the start.