I know what you want me to hear.
You want me to hear that youâre modern and amazing. You want me to hear that you respect the maker schedule. That you arenât afraid to break ranks with corporate dogma. That nobody else will admit how awful meetings are, but you will. You want me to hear that you move fast, and that nothing great was ever designed by committee.
Thatâs not what I hear.
I had coffee with a leader at a startup a few weeks ago. He asked me for some advice about ways to get his teams aligned around product and strategy decisions. The teams donât work together well, he said. And no one knows whatâs going on. And it means we move too slowly. I asked what tools he uses right nowâââhow communication happens and where the opportunities for alignment are. He winced, and explained that their company had a meetings-free culture, so a lot of the things I was describing werenât options.
When you tell me your company doesnât do meetings, this is what I hear.
You donât understand the privilege of executive context
Itâs true that your people are sometimes excited about a meeting-free environment, at least at first. But making it a company-wide policy (or even an aspiration) comes from the top. And, in a way, itâs not too surprising. For a founder CEO who isnât paying attention to his or her people, meetings feel like a waste of time.
Hereâs how the argument goes: Meetings are expensive. Every CEO tells the same story. You know the one? It goes, âimagine a giant clock ticking off the combined salary of everyone in the room as we talk about this crap.â Of course youâve heard that story. We all have. And surely a scrappy, driven startup can do better than to indebt themselves to that clock.
If youâre just communicating status? Use Slack or email. Coordinating work? Use Google Docs or Jira. Have a shift in strategy? Just share around the board deck and ask for comments inline.
It takes an astonishing amount of effort to get people to hear a thing.
As a CEO, especially in the early days, you have maximum context about the state and goals of the business. For you, meetings are operational exercisesâââwho does whatâââand they seem inefficient. But your people do not have all the context. For them, meetings are both operational exercise and context sharing.
Getting rid of meetings to focus on the work sounds intuitive, but only because you canât feel the loss of context that happens. You donât suffer that loss, at least not right away. But your team does. A question in a marketing meeting about why the marketing looks a certain way starts a short sidebar about who weâre targeting. The marketers thought that was obvious because to them it is. But three people in the room didnât realize it at all, and will do their jobs better as a result. Unless that meeting never happened.
Could they have read it in a slide deck? Yep, but they didnât. BecauseâŠ
You also undervalue narrative and alignment
Humans canât help it. We love stories. And when you put a bunch of us together, even our operational updates get context woven in. It makes things seem less efficient, but the truth is that this is how we hear things, and decide to care about them.
It takes an astonishing amount of effort to get people to hear a thing. I remember John Lillyâs rule was that he had to say a thing three times more often than he thought he should have to, if he wanted people to hear it. In hindsight, I suspect heâd agree that numberâs still low.
Sometimes alignment happens in grand gestures like a team offsite or a strategy session (which, to be clear, are also meetings). But those big opportunities are too infrequent. You miss the chance to nip alignment issues early.
Effective leaders are always adjusting alignment, re-telling the story, bringing us back to our core, and applying it to new problems. Not just because theyâre enamoured with their companyâs origin myths. They repeat these points over and over because they know that narrative drives behaviour change like nothing else.
Those stories get told in 1:1s (those are meetings) and in all-hands discussions (also meetings!) but working meetings are often the ones where narrative has the most impact. In a 1:1 you can say âWe value this thing.â You can say it in a town hall, too. But itâs in a planning meeting, or a decision-making discussion, where you can say, âWe value this thing and therefore we shouldâŠâ. Watching those values and narratives in direct application is a major piece of how they drive an organization. It gives your values life. And, like plants, they need regular watering or else they wither.
And you threw that out. Mostly, if weâre being honest, becauseâŠ
You donât know how to run an effective meeting
This is really the crux of it all. And itâs such an unsatisfying reason. Iâve heard people say this about various elements of business and it always sounds absurd to me.
âI had 1:1s at this one company and they werenât very useful, so weâre not doing them here.â
âOur last all-hands was poorly run, so weâre not going to do them any ore.â
âThose planning meetings are two hours long and terrible so weâre just not going to have them.â
It wasnât easy and perfect the first time out, so screw it? My toddler has more gumption.
Meetingsâââdiscussions between colleagues about the work to be done and the reasons for doing itâââare important. I shouldnât have to say it, but here we are. But just because theyâre important doesnât mean they organize themselves. And this is what I see trip people up.
People understand that there are systems to accounting. There are systems to project management, and sales, marketing message development. And there are systems to meetings. Lots of them.
If youâve never bothered to apply one of them Iâm not sure why youâve given up. I canât do the topic justice in a hundred words, but if it whets your appetite, they typically boil down to four questions:
1. Who is running this meeting?
2. What is the output of this meeting?
3. Who are the right people to produce that output?
4. How are we going to get to that output?
How you run meetings can and should adapt to your culture and your models of decision-making and collaboration.
If itâs a product decision that needs to be made, maybe the product owner runs it. The output is a decision. You canât make the decision without marketing, engineering, PM, and design in the room. And our process is to have the PM outline the problem and the three possibilities. Weâre going to talk down each of the options for 10 minutes, and then the product owner is going to make the call and weâre all going to get behind it.
If itâs a change in business strategy maybe you say: CEO runs it. Output is shared context and understanding, and a set of follow-up jobs. Whole company needs to be there. Weâre going to get there with a prepared walk through by the CEO followed by Q&A.
The fact that there ought to be a system doesnât mean you canât make it your own. How you run meetings can and should adapt to your culture and your models of decision-making and collaboration. How do you distribute materials and solicit feedback to respect different introvert/extrovert communication styles? What are the right ways to ensure your remote employees donât have to struggle to get a word in? How do you rotate ownership to give junior team members an opportunity to grow? What training do they need? All of this stuff matters. But if you donât have a system at all, I donât understand how you hope to stay effective as you grow.
Can you hear me now?
I know how hard it is to build a business. I know the temptation to dump the stuff thatâs hard or not working well. Whoâs gonna go to the mat to defend meetings, of all things?
But I want to believe that, if youâre building this thing, you want it to grow and mature. That you want to have an impact on the world, and bring along a growing team of people who believe. People who see what you see, and who will help make that future clearer and nearer.
Whether itâs meetings, or performance reviews, or parental benefits, or diversity work, or basic fucking decency. Whatever the core business function is that you feel tempted to just punt on, my best advice to you is to see that ignorance for what it is. Use it as an impetus to get better. Tech has changed a lot about whatâs possible, but it hasnât made people stop being people. If you donât like meetings, stop running bad ones.
This article was syndicated with permission from The Co-Pour