The most popular article on my website is 4 Reasons to Cancel that Meeting! but no one had ever contacted me about it until I got a call this week from someone in Baltimore. His meeting fit the bill so he cancelled it. Unfortunately, his actions were not well received! Why? Because it wasn’t really his meeting to cancel. Sure, he was responsible for the agenda. He scheduled the meeting. But he was not the true instigator. He was acting on behalf of someone with more authority and that was undoubtedly the person upset by the cancellation. 

If you are given responsibility by someone else for scheduling, planning, and running a meeting that meets one of the four criteria for canceling, I don’t recommend that you act alone.

• If you don’t understand the purpose of the meeting, you need to go back to the initiator and ask questions about the specific outcomes desired until you are clear about the purpose.
• If you don’t have a plan to achieve the purpose, get help. The initiator may or may not be the ideal source for help but it is a good place to start because discussing the plan may further clarify the purpose.
• If you are not prepared, you probably don’t want to admit it. Weigh the risks of winging it against the risks of rescheduling. If I were your boss, I would be disappointed but glad you ‘fessed up instead of wasting everyone’s time, assuming rescheduling is not a complete nightmare.
• If you determine that other participants are unprepared, you’ve got a totally different problem and you probably are not the right person to resolve it. In many cases, you need to elevate this problem as well. Postponing rewards the unprepared with no guarantee they will be prepared the next time. Holding the meeting with insufficient preparation risks:

1. Wasting everyone’s time
2. Making decisions with insufficient information, and
3. Publicly humiliating the unprepared.

The first is the perpetual crime of bad meetings. The second can be serious. People are so eager to make progress, make the decisions they came to make, and get the meeting over with that they dismiss glaring obstacles and red flags. The third is not always bad, nor always good; it depends on the situation.

Do your part to end wasteful meetings but don’t be stupid about it!