Making meetings better: must-have advice from 11 business leaders

Meetings are crucial for companies but they must have a point and be well-planned. They should have clear goals and outcomes, and everyone needs to have the right information.

“Tradition is the bane of effective meetings,” writes famed sports promoter Mark McCormack in McCormack On Managing.

“As a CEO, I probably spend more time thinking about the make-up, timing, length and form of our company’s various meetings than I do about any other managerial responsibility.

“My biggest fear is that we will get in a meetings rut … My recommendation to all managers is simpler: if you have a volatile, dynamic, ever-changing company or division, you must periodically rip apart the complete fabric of your meetings. Question every aspect of the meeting — the agenda, the format, the length, the locale, the cast of characters — and be particularly ruthless with those features that exist solely because of historical precedent. When people justify a policy or practice because ‘we’ve always done it this way,’ a good manager knows precisely where to start slashing.”

“Why do we meet in the first place?”, asks RedBalloon founding director Naomi Simson in this blog post.

Here’s why:

1. To accelerate decisions

2. To exchange information

3. To get buy-in for ideas

4. To unite the team

5. To solve problems and formulate a plan.

“These are all valued reasons to meet, however, ‘talk fests’, ‘group think’ and ‘inward focus’, rather than focusing on the customer, is often what really takes place … When you are a founder you are incredibly pragmatic — you know the cost of time and that the real cost of the meeting is not only the combined salaries of the group meeting, it is the opportunity cost of not being with customers, suppliers or creating new opportunities.”

“To be sure, meetings are essential for enabling collaboration, creativity, and innovation. They often foster relationships and ensure proper information exchange. They provide real benefits,” write Leslie Perlow, Constance Noonan Hadley and Eunice Eun in the Harvard Business Review.

“But why would anyone argue in defense of excessive meetings, especially when no one likes them much?

“Because executives want to be good soldiers. When they sacrifice their own time and well-being for meetings, they assume they’re doing what’s best for the business — and they don’t see the costs to the organisation. They overlook the collective toll on productivity, focus, and engagement.

“For one thing, time is zero-sum. Every minute spent in a wasteful meeting eats into time for solo work that’s equally essential for creativity and efficiency. For another, schedules riddled with meetings interrupt ‘deep work’ — a term that the Georgetown computer science professor Cal Newport uses to describe the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task … As a consequence, people tend to come to work early, stay late, or use weekends for quiet time to concentrate.”

“I always have an agenda before I go into a meeting,” says Mark McCormack in McCormack On Managing.

“I don’t necessarily broadcast it to the attendees or, as some executives like to do, distribute it in writing as people enter the room. But I do give it a lot of thought. If I have 35 points to cover, I treat each point like an accountant with his ledger. I gauge how much time we need to discuss each point. I then factor in some time for digressions. If it is a meeting with senior executives, who tend to be more loquacious and forthcoming with their opinions, I ask them ahead of time what points they want to add to the agenda and how much time they think they’ll need. Totalling up my estimates tells me how long the meeting should last.

“It also tells me how to prioritise my 35 points. As a general rule, I like to deal with the quick, easy points on my agenda first and tackle the meatier issues last. Experience has taught me that it’s better to have covered 34 points and be in a long discussion at the end that I can terminate for another time than to have the long discussion first and not be able to cover, say, 21 of the remaining 34 points.

“Incredibly, I know a lot of managers who do this backwards. They call a four-hour meeting and hope they can squeeze their 35 points in. Thus, when they get bogged down in a 45-minute digression on one point, they’re not aware that they have only 195 minutes left to cover 34 points, or about five minutes a point. If they did the arithmetic, they’d realise that’s not enough time.”

“Before a manager schedules a meeting, he or she must be clear about its purpose,” write Elliott Jaques and Stephen Clement in their management classic Executive Leadership.

“All information must be relevant to the subordinates’ assigned tasks, or should at least be related to the overall context of those tasks … Additionally, all information provided should be of an appropriate degree of complexity to be of use to team members, i.e. not too simple (too many details) nor too difficult (too many variables and/or too many interdependent relationships). It is equally important for the manager to ensure that problems are of an appropriate degree of complexity for team members to be able to grapple with all of the relevant variables.”

“Make it clear who is directing the meeting and whom it is meant to serve,” says entrepreneur and business thinker Ray Dalio in Principles: Life and Work.

“Every meeting should be aimed at achieving someone’s goals; that person is the one responsible for the meeting and decides what they want to get out of it and how they will do so. Meetings without someone clearly responsible run a high risk of being directionless and unproductive.

“People’s emotions tend to heat up when there is disagreement. Remain calm and analytical at all times; it is more difficult to shut down a logical exchange than an emotional one. Remember too that emotions can shade how people see reality. For example, people will sometimes say, ‘I feel like (something is true)’ and proceed as though it’s a fact, when other people may interpret the same situation differently. Ask them, ‘Is it true?’ to ground the conversation in reality.

“Conversations that fail to reach completion are a waste of time. When there is an exchange of ideas, it is important to end it by stating the conclusions. If there is agreement, say it; if not, say that. Where further action has been decided, get those tasks on a to-do list, assign people to do them, and specify due dates. Write down your conclusions, working theories, and to-do’s in places that will lead to their being used as foundations for continued progress. To make sure this happens, assign someone to make sure notes are taken and follow-through occurs.”

Entrepreneur and business thinker Ray Dalio. Source: YouTube.

“In my weekly staff meeting, I inserted an agenda item titled ‘What Are We Not Doing?’” explains Ben Horowitz, cofounder and general partner of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, in The Hard Thing About Hard Things.

“Ordinarily in a staff meeting, you spend lots of time reviewing, evaluating, and improving all of the things that you do: build products, sell products, support customers, hire employees, and the like. Sometimes, however, the things you’re not doing are the things you should actually be focused on.”

“Meeting minutes are often perceived in businesses to be both a necessary evil and a complete waste of time,” suggests Brené Brown in this glossary from her book Born to Lead.

“They’re often fastidiously collected and then routinely ignored.

“Structured collaborative meeting minutes can serve as a great communication and record-keeping tool. We suggest including: date, meeting intention, attendees, key decisions, tasks and ownership. Although one person captures the minutes, everyone in the meeting is responsible for taking their own notes and for flagging important information that should be captured in the minutes.

“Most important, we leave time at the end of the meeting to review and agree on the minutes. Notes are shared in Slack channels, where they are available to everyone involved. When using this process, meeting minutes are no longer subjective, [and] everyone stays up to speed on decisions and changes.”

Brené Brown speaking at Qualtrics Work Different online event. Source: Qualtrics.

“Mark, I want you to do one thing for me. Whenever we sit down for a meeting, I want you to take out your pad of paper and pen, and in the upper right-hand corner, write down the word listen.”

That’s the advice given by a colleague many years ago to US businessman and investor Mark Cuban follows to this day, as outlined in Hook Point: How to Stand Out in a 3-Second World, by Brendan Kane.

“He writes down the word listen before every meeting to remind himself to be quiet and hear what the other people in the room have to say,” explains Kane.