Ten Pitfalls of Pitiful Meetings and How to Fix Them by Kimberly Douglas

If your team members (or you) hear “Meeting at 3:00” and think, “Here comes another waste of my time,” then it’s time for a meeting overhaul at your organization. While meetings can be important team-building and idea-generating opportunities for your employees, the key is knowing how to do them the right way.

It’s Friday afternoon, and your team is filing into the conference room, mumbling and grumbling as they take their seats for yet another meeting. An hour passes and the meeting comes to a much anticipated end, leaving everyone involved wondering why the meeting was held in the first place. After all, the usual suspects dominated the discussion, and the same ideas that came up in last week’s meeting were once again batted around. No one seemed to write anything down, and no one agreed to put anything discussed into action. If this kind of ineffective meeting sounds familiar, you’re not alone. It’s a problem that plagues many organizations—but it’s also one, she adds, that can be remedied.

In these tough economic times, every second of the work day is valuable. None of it should be wasted in meetings that seem to go nowhere or that are plagued by conflict or lack of participation. I have sat through countless meetings myself—some great, and some not-so-great. But those that weren’t so great could have been so much better with just a little more effort. If leaders know how to conduct better meetings, those meetings can actually become time well-spent—time that increases employee productivity, participation, and innovation.

The question of productivity is a huge issue when it comes to meetings. According to a Microsoft survey of more than 38,000 employees, almost 70 percent felt that the average 5.6 hours they spend each week in meetings are unproductive. Another survey conducted by OfficeTeam had 28 percent of its 150 senior executives responding that meetings are a waste of time. Furthermore, 45 percent of respondents said they believed their employees could be more productive if meetings were banned at least one day a week.

In too many companies, meetings have become a way for leaders and their employees to simply go through the motions. If a new initiative is being implemented or new product ideas are needed, the feeling from management is often, ‘Well, let’s have a meeting. At least it will seem like we are doing something.’ Unfortunately, not enough thought goes into how to conduct those meetings. Having a meeting, in and of itself, is not a bad idea. In fact, meetings can be the most engaging and thought-provoking times of the day for leaders and team members alike. The key is avoiding those pitfalls that sink a meeting’s productivity.

If it’s time for a meetings overhaul at your organization, read on for 10 common meeting pitfalls and how you can fix them:

What’s the point?

A common problem with many meetings is that they’re scheduled with seemingly no clear objective in mind. I suggest that you run through a premeeting checklist before putting it on everyone’s schedule. First, ask yourself whether the meeting is even necessary. Could the information you want to provide be just as easily presented in an e-mail? What do you want to accomplish with the meeting? Will reaching that accomplishment really require a group decision? If you ask yourself these questions and decide that you do need to have the meeting, next consider who should attend. Design an agenda for the meeting and clearly communicate any prep work that needs to be done by the participants beforehand.

Where’s the agenda?

Remember the last time you actually received an agenda in advance of a meeting? Likely, you immediately had a higher perception of whether that meeting was going to be a waste of time or not. Once you know who will be attending the meeting, you need to finalize the agenda. A quality meeting agenda includes:

• The date, time, and location of the meeting
• The meeting’s objectives
• Three to six agenda items, accompanied by how long they’ll take to discuss and who the discussion leaders will be
• A clear explanation of the prep work that should be completed before the meeting

When putting together the agenda for your meeting, consider using the individual Hermann Brain Dominance Instrument profiles of your team members. Before you begin your meetings overhaul, have an HBDI-certified specialist come in to profile your team. The HBDI is an assessment instrument that measures people’s specific thinking preferences. Your team members will be divided based on the HBDI quadrants: Analyze (the blue quadrant), Organize (the green quadrant), Strategize (the yellow quadrant), and Personalize (the red quadrant). Once you know how your team members think, you can design a meeting agenda that better suits each one of them. It is a great way to design your meetings so that there is something for everyone, and you can even color code your agenda based on the quadrant colors to indicate which parts of the meeting your team members will find the most engaging.

Conference room overcrowding

Would you attend a meeting if you didn’t know why the meeting was being held and why you, in particular, were invited? Often, too many people who don’t have a clear understanding of what role they are supposed to play are invited to meetings. Those in attendance need to know if you want them to be an expert, an influencer, or a decider.

When you’re creating your meeting participant list, think about the meeting’s purpose. Make sure everyone who is attending the meeting knows exactly why they were invited. If critical members can’t attend, consider postponing the meeting until they can. Having a meeting without all of the right brains present can cause just as many delays and productivity problems as postponing the meeting a couple of days. Finally, use the following litmus test. 

Once you do get all of the right team members assembled, you might also consider having them use a meeting cost calculator, which allows them to privately enter in their salaries and the meeting length to calculate how much it is costing the company for them to be in a given meeting. It is a powerful tool that can promote individual productivity, because it reminds everyone involved of the financial significance of the time spent in the meeting.

Big talkers eat up all the time

Every meeting has them: those people who love to let everyone know they are the most important people in the room, have the best ideas, and have a comment to make on every subject. Your conversational ground rules should help keep your big talkers (or big-headed) in line, but there are other ways to ensure that one person doesn’t dominate. First, don’t let big talkers sit at the front of the room or the back center of a U-shape. This definitely gives them a feeling of being on stage. In fact, you may even want to use assigned seating for the meeting. (If you decide to use assigned seating, change the assignments for each meeting, and if you are the leader, change where you sit each meeting.) Doing so will also prevent big talkers from sitting next to a buddy. Big talkers tend to feed off of one another, and separating them will help reduce their excessive input.

Conflict kills productivity

An important thing to keep in mind is that effective meetings aren’t necessarily free of conflict. In fact, conflict can be a good thing, and it should be valued by those attending any given meeting. The key is not letting it get out of hand. View conflict as “creative abrasion,” a phrase coined by the president of Nissan Design International, Jerry Hirshberg. Here’s a metaphorical explanation of how it works: Picture two tectonic plates on the earth’s surface—your way and my way, perhaps—grating against each other. Many people know that when this kind of friction occurs between plates, earthquakes often ensue. But what happens when these two plates—or viewpoints—come together? If the environment is right, they create a mountain—a third viewpoint that is a product of the first two approaches and that is grander, loftier, and more powerful than either one was on its own. In other words, conflict is turned into synergy.

For creative abrasion to work, leaders have to view conflict as a good thing. When a conflict arises, maybe someone disagrees with an idea that’s been thrown out or how a certain issue was handled. Defuse the disagreement with collaboration. Openly discuss solutions and compromises that everyone can get behind. Remember, conflict is a group issue. Don’t single anyone out when a conflict arises. Handle it as a group. Create and reinforce a common set of group conflict norms. Similar to the ground rules you use to make your meeting more effective, conflict norms can be used to beget productive discussions that will lead to decisions to which everyone can—and will—commit. Have each member of your team write down three to five norms that would lead the group as a whole to a more productive conflict and allow for better decision making. Examples include: "Establish a common goal that the group fully understands;" "Provide an opportunity for every voice to be heard;" "Speak so others can hear your message;" "Clarify pros, cons, and risks of options or potential solutions," etc.

Who is making the decisions?

So your meeting is nearly over, you’ve discussed everything on the agenda, and you’re ready to send everyone on their way. Unfortunately, no one is quite clear about what they’re supposed to be doing or who is going to make that decision. As the leader, you don’t have to be the one making all of the decisions, but you do have to make sure the decision-making process is clear to everyone. Decide what the best decision-making process is at the beginning of the meeting based on the criticality of the decision, time constraints, and the need for buy-in. Will a group compromise be necessary? Should everyone vote and defer to the majority’s decision? Will it be better to build a consensus and go from there? Or should you, the leader, make the call? The best method is going to depend on what exactly the meeting’s goal is.

The Vroom-Yetton Decision Making Model can be used to help you decide which approach to take. It is a powerful tool for determining and making explicit how groups will make decisions. As the leader, use this framework to help you think through which level of input you want from the team before you even engage them in discussion on the issue. The levels of the Vroom-Yetton are as follows: Autocratic, consultative, and group-based (more information about these levels can be found in my book The Firefly Effect: Build Teams That Capture Creativity and Catapult Results (Wiley, 2009). With those levels in mind, a leader must also consider such factors as the need for complete buy-in from the team, timing, complexity of the problem, breadth of impact of the decision, etc. Basically, the more critical the decision and the more buy-in you need for the execution of the decision to be effective, the more consensus you need to build.

No decisions, commitments, or steps captured

Too often, meetings end and everyone simply goes back to business as usual without putting anything that was discussed into action or even knowing what they personally should do. To capture what went on during the meeting, keep the format simple; the task is much more likely to be done and the information distributed. There is no simpler way to record what went on than by writing on a flip chart the who, what, and by when of the directives discussed in the meeting.

Do a round robin with everyone recapping what they are accountable for delivering. Good questions for the leader to ask to get people thinking about the impact of the meeting include, "Who wasn’t in today’s meeting who needs to know what we decided today?" and, "How are we going to communicate this to them?" Once decisions have been made and everyone knows how they will be communicated, set the date, time, and location for next meeting, making it clear that all will be responsible for reporting on the results of this meeting’s action items at the next meeting. Always distribute a brief meeting summary within 24 hours of the meeting. The meeting summary will reinforce to everyone that results are expected.

I believe wholeheartedly that a team meeting can be the most productive and exciting time in that team’s life. Unfortunately, too many organizations meet for the wrong reasons or have simply fallen into a going-through-the-motions meeting style. By implementing a few simple tools, you can breathe life back into your meetings. Give these strategies time to take hold, and you’ll find that your meetings can become times of trust building, problem solving, and collaboration that will energize your employees and give way to innovation that will greatly benefit the organization as a whole.