“Do you want to start or should I? This is the worst possible way to open a meeting. And, yet, it is also among the most common. Epidemic, actually. I think it must be contagious. Why is it bad?
Want to make me cringe and grimace? Ask me to attend an “informational” meeting. These are those anti-productivity meetings that invite everyone to talk. Without any particular purpose! They invoke the worst of all Treadmill Verbs™: inform. Inform, like all Treadmill Verbs™, has no destination. You can inform forever. There is no way to know when you are done!
When my parents died, their wills suggested an onerous process for dividing belongings among 5 siblings. But at least they provided a process! They also indicated we were welcome to come up with a better process, if we so desired. My parents, who probably had something to do with my clarity(!), clearly knew the importance of having a process! As executrix, I gladly proposed a better process. Being me, I’m pretty sure I would have done so regardless of whether or not it was my responsibility. So I wrote up a simple process, explained it to all siblings, asked for opinions, and then got their signatures to confirm agreement before anyone began claiming anything. The process worked smoothly. Success depended only on the thought invested by each sibling into their desires and needs. Everyone left with a combination of cherished and practical items. There was one opportunity for dissension, however.
Most well-run organizations are pretty good at creating what I call “Organizational Clarity.” They have strategic priorities and annual goals. They have job descriptions, policies, rules, and training programs. They have well-defined and documented production processes. They also have well-defined management systems that control things like performance reviews, budgeting, approval processes, and projects. All told, these constitute a yeoman’s effort to create: Clear purpose, Clear roles, and Clear process – the three keys to productive, effective, committed employees. The resulting structure and controls are essential for allowing growing and shifting numbers of people to work together effectively. But there’s a problem with this: It doesn’t help employees get through their average workday.
In last month’s Clear Thoughts, I suggested an exercise that I hope you tried. The exercise was to pick a typical item off a meeting agenda and then compete in pairs for two minutes to see who can brainstorm the longest list of possible directions the conversation could go given that topic. When I do this exercise in workshops, the idea is initially met with bewilderment, but it doesn’t last. The winning pair usually comes up with about twenty different directions. By the time we collect all the non-overlapping ideas from the other pairs, the total is typically three dozen topics. So what is the point of this exercise? Before you read on, maybe you want to stop and draw your own conclusions. If you come up with conclusions I don’t list, I’d love to hear about them. Ready For My List?
Remember what it was like to get your first eyeglasses? Or the revelation provided regularly when the eye doctor replaces the blurry eye chart with stunning clarity by sliding that big old refractor in front of your eyes? My mother thought the world looked better when she couldn’t see all the depressing details. The rest of us love crystal clear vision. At least I think so! But what’s interesting is that until you visit the eye doctor and suddenly see with a new level of clarity, you don’t know what you’ve been missing. There is no way of knowing how blurry your world is. Most people see what they see and pretty much assume they see what everybody else sees.
I tell my clients they must put an end to informing each other. Why? Because inform is a Treadmill Verb™. And like other Treadmill Verbs™, such as report and review, it has no destination. There is no way to know when you are done. It is an open invitation to talk on and on with no particular outcome in mind. It leaves people listening, assuming they are listening at all, for nothing in particular. Thus, it accomplishes little, encourages smartphone tinkering, and leaves most people bored and disengaged. Unfortunately, inform remains a favorite agenda item. Even die-hard fans of mine who have memorized the six clarity kernels still argue that it is important to simply inform people.
Unless you’ve had your head in the sand or like to waste time, you know meetings suck up a tremendous amount of valuable time. You’ve also read lots of advice that is supposed to help. You’ve probably even tried some of that advice. And you are not alone. So why is it that meetings are still wasting so much time and everyone is still complaining about them? This is why: 99% of the advice you’ve heard for improving meetings doesn’t work.
Every company I encounter is trying to do more with less. I know numerous executives and managers who seem to acquire additional titles as often as they receive year-end bonuses. Employees at every level juggle To Do lists more prolific than rabbits. Unbelievably, most accept this fate and persevere the best they can. Since they’ve been told repeatedly to “work smarter, not harder,” many, especially the high achievers, assume responsibility for their long hours and blame themselves for not being smart enough to avoid working so hard. In their spare time, they surf the Internet hoping to find the holy grail — that magical tip that will finally end their suffering and let them please their bosses while also enjoying their evenings and weekends once again. Is it really possible to improve productivity at this point? Absolutely!
The tangible outcomes of progress are easy to measure: sales, profits, market penetration, and yield, as well as number of products, parts, members, programs, etc. Many employees are pretty clear about their goals in relation to these type of results. But only those on the “production line” can really tie their own productivity to these metrics: Parts per hour, sales per week, hours per production, etc. Everyone else spends a lot of time talking, thinking, writing, and reading, often with little to show for it. As a matter of fact, the farther they are from the assembly line, the more time spent this way and the less time spent producing tangible value for which customers are willing to pay.