#63: Stop Having Bad Meetings

You're listening to the Proteus Leader Show with Erika Andersen, where you'll get practical tools and insights for leading, managing, and staying ready for the future. Erika is the founding partner of Proteus, a firm that focuses uniquely on leader readiness. A nationally known executive coach and bestselling author, you may already know her as one of the most popular leadership bloggers on Forbes.com. Ready for something you can use today? Here's Erika.

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Proteus Leader Show. My guest today is Greg Harrod, a leader and coach who trains people to lead with kindness and confidence. In Greg's blog and on his podcast, he focuses on how leaders can care deeply about their teammates as fellow human beings and still deliver exceptional results for their organizations. One of the ways Greg supports leaders to do this is by helping them, as he says, to stop having bad meetings. So welcome to the show, Greg.

Thank you very much, Erika. It's a pleasure to be on.

Yes, I'm very excited to have you here. So you, as you know, you and I were introduced by our mutual friend Karen Ziegler, who told me that you had great insights into this important topic of meetings. And so especially now when so many meetings happen and so many more meetings are happening virtually and starting to happening in person, I just thought it'd be especially helpful to our listeners to get your advice about how to improve the meetings they attend and the meetings they manage.

Yeah, I appreciate that. It's, it's sort of a movement we're starting to stop bad meetings.

Yeah, I love that. Well, so let's, let's dive in then. So you talk about— when you and I have talked about this a little, you talk about purpose, people, and preparation as the core of creating effective meetings. I love that frame. So can you tell us more about those 3 things and why you find them so critical?

Yeah, certainly. And I think you'd agree, Erika, and probably your listeners would as well, that if there's one thing that people find is, is not a favorite, I'll just say, in the workplace, it's meetings.

Yeah.

And generally it's bad meetings. So when we think about what can we do to actually make a difference, either in the meetings that we, that we lead, that we invite people to, that we create, or in the meetings we attend, We want to start simple. Just where can we start with something that we can remember, a difference we can make? And the 3 Ps are a good way to remember that.

Yeah.

So if we start with the first being purpose, the second being people, the third being preparation, as you said, purpose is what it's all about. So many times people will say, you know, I'm in this meeting, I don't even know why I'm here. And I think if you ask the person who called the meeting, Sometimes they don't know why they called the meeting themselves, which is kind of sad.

Absolutely. I completely agree with you about this, Greg, and often I think meetings just have a kind of momentum. I mean, I've said to people, so why, why do you have this meeting? And the answers I get are something like, well, we've always had this meeting.

I think this is a consistent theme. People don't like bad meetings, and part of that aspect they don't like is they don't know the purpose.

Yeah, yeah.

So that first step, the first P, is simply to ask yourself, why is this meeting being held?

Yeah.

And I found in my personal experience, I'll sit down, I think, okay, I need to have this meeting. When I get into the details, like why specifically do I need to have this meeting, it's a challenge sometimes.

Yeah.

I like to list out actions When we think about why do we need to decide something, do we need to review something, do we need to present something, do we need to solve a problem, going to those action words helped me to find the purpose. Have you found that to be true as well?

100%. What one of the questions I ask, which I think is very similar to what you're saying, is what would success look like if people really get stuck on purpose? Okay, well, so let's say we actually have this meeting and it takes an hour, an hour and a half. What would have happened at the end for you to be happy about it? That sometimes helps people kind of back into purpose, right?

That's a great question. Another way to say is that, what do we want to accomplish?

Yes, exactly.

And when you can tell people you're coming to a meeting to accomplish a specific purpose, that helps people be motivated.

Yeah, yeah, 100%. And it helps them really stay focused. That's the other thing. I think one of the reasons that meetings are bad is people just— because people don't know the purpose, they just kind of come in and ramble. And then then everybody hates it even more. But when you know what you're trying to accomplish, what success would look like, then people tend to stay more focused.

Yeah, exactly right. So that purpose leads us to the second P, which is people. And that's an easy question to ask once you know the purpose. Who needs to be in the meeting to accomplish the purpose?

Yeah. Oh, I love that connection, Greg. And that's— I especially like that because I feel like a lot of times The reason people are invited to come to a meeting is— it's all kinds of reasons. FOMO, and, you know, I was here last week, and my boss is here, you know, just silly reasons. And I completely agree with you that if you know what the purpose of the meeting is, then it's pretty easy to put together the attendance list.

It is, and you can define those roles more specifically. Who's the primary audience? Who is an expert? Who's a consultant? Who's the secondary audience?

Yeah, yeah, that's great.

Yeah, and another role that I think is very important is the, the note-taker. Who's the person who's taking the notes to say who's going to do what by when?

Yeah.

To accomplish the purpose. So if we go to the third, so the first P is purpose, the second P is people, the third P is preparation. So what work needs to be done prior to the meeting either by the leader or by the participants To make sure that the people who are there can accomplish the purpose of the meeting.

I really agree with that too, Greg, and a lot of times because the owner or, or kind of manager of the meeting doesn't think about those things beforehand, what ends up happening is either people are unprepared or they do the stuff they should have done ahead of time during the meeting and, and take up that valuable time doing things that they could have done individually beforehand.

Yeah, and you pointed to my website. I really appreciate that. But we talk a lot about leading with kindness and confidence and to take care of the people that you invite to the meeting. In my perspective, you're a steward of their time. So to put them in a position to be successful, you need to tell them the purpose, tell them specifically why they as an individual need to be there, which gives them value. And then it allows them to prepare so that when they arrive, they can actually be successful. Instead of being put into a spot where they are kind of positioned to fail.

If— I doubt that our listeners need more motivation, but just to motivate them even more to do these things, what do you— I'm sure you've seen lots of very bad meetings, so what do you see as the main human and organizational costs of having bad meetings?

Well, you've probably seen the stats on various places on the internet, and some of them are not founded in data. But the amount of time people waste in meetings is just astounding. So in a business, time equals money.

Yeah, yeah.

So that means the amount of money that people waste in bad meetings is astounding as well. But the— there's a bigger impact, and you said it, it's the human factor. So if you think about the way that people describe meetings and the words they use, it's really, it's really revealing. They use words like hate, mind-numbing.

Yeah.

It's just, if you described any other aspect of a business that way, or a person in the business, the manager, the CEO, whoever would say, we need to eliminate that immediately. This is destroying our culture. And that's what's happening with bad meetings is people find that it's demotivating. It's part of what drives the great resignation that we hear talked about.

Yeah.

People don't want to be in an organization where they have bad meetings.

Yes.

Because they're not put in a position to succeed and be successful.

Boy, I really agree with that. And as you're talking, I think there's even a deeper kind of— I think that managers who allow bad meetings to continue, it really erodes their credibility. Because everybody's sitting in that meeting, and it's not effective, and the purpose isn't clear, and the wrong people are in the meeting, all the things you're saying. And they're sitting there thinking, does he or she not know how terrible this is? You know?

Yeah.

So I think that's a big thing too.

As you said, with the simplicity and the clarity, it helps to drive a really effective meeting. So I'm sure our listeners might be asking, well, I don't call any meetings, I don't actually lead them. This approach can be applied there as well. It's a simple email or maybe a conversation if you get invited to a meeting. And Erika, I don't know about you, but I generally work in a Microsoft environment, so you get the email The email meeting invitation, it includes the link to the Teams meeting, nothing else.

Right. Nothing about what it— you have no idea. Yeah. Yeah.

So the easy follow-up to apply this is simply to reach out to the meeting invitation, whoever sent you the invitation, the meeting owner, and say, hey, I really want to be prepared. I know that you want me to be there. What specific purpose do you want me to accomplish in the meeting? So that helps the meeting leader be even more successful because then they have to think about it and say, you know, I want you to do this. And it helps them clarify what the purpose— what their purpose is for calling the meeting.

I love that. So that was so, you know, the third thing I was going to ask you is exactly where you're going, which is what if you're not necessarily managing a meeting, but you're— if you're— what can you do to improve the meetings you attend? And I love that. So it's What do you expect from me? And also, what do you expect from the meeting? To really ask them what they see as the purpose of the meeting.

Yeah, and not in a, in an accusatory or judgmental way.

Sure.

Yeah, simply by asking the question almost in a coaching style to say, hey, I know you want to be successful with this meeting. We've got 8 people in here. This is really expensive. What exactly do we want to accomplish today?

And then let's, let's ramp it up even one step. So Let's say that one of our listeners just comes into it. You're in, you're already in a meeting and you realize that it's just one of these bad meetings that we're talking about. What can you do then? What can you do right in process?

Yeah, really easy question to ask would be simply, hey, I know we all want to make the most of our time here. Can you remind me, what do we need to accomplish today? And people love to have meetings canceled, unfortunately, because most of them are bad. Yeah, but either during the meeting or before the meeting, if you ask that question and you realize, you know, we really don't need to meet this week, I could do this in a simple email, then that becomes— you have one less bad meeting and the rest of them will be really effective.

I love that. I love the simplicity of that. Well, this is wonderful. I mean, I'm sure we could keep talking about this for a long time, but I, as I said, I love the simplicity and the clarity, and I completely agree with you that if people did these simple things, Then the meetings that they attend and that they lead would be much better. So we're all going to have better lives. So listeners, to find out more about Greg's work and to get more advice on a variety of key leadership topics, you can go to gregharrod.com, where you'll find his Connect, Mobilize, Deliver podcast and his blog. And if you'd like to find out how Proteus supports leaders to be more followable, you're welcome to go to proteusleader.com. Click on Topics and choose Accepted Leader. So thanks, Greg. I really appreciate you being here with me.

Yeah, thanks, Erika. I appreciate the opportunity to join together and stop bad meetings.

Stop bad meetings. So thank you for listening, everybody, and until next time, here's to creating the life you truly want.

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