Stop Treating Meetings As Discrete Events. Build Relationships Instead

Almost every large organization has too many meetings. Some organizations try to fix the problem by adopting meeting management protocols. They’re missing the forest for the trees. Meetings don’t stand alone. They are tools to help people move projects, programs, and processes forward. And, their particular value is giving people the chance to interact and strengthen their relationships.

The Worst Meetings

The worst meetings are held just for the sake of having a meeting. These tend to be standing meetings that happen daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually, in which no one remembers why they’re at the meeting, show up out of habit or obligation, and do the minimum they can get away with.

Better Meetings

Better meetings follow basic meeting protocols and have:

• One person responsible for the meeting process
• Single overall objective – purpose/outcomes: inform, discuss, debate, contribute, decide
• Agenda with clear expectations for learning, contributions, and decisions by item with time allocated to match what’s needed and a bias to tackling fewer things better with more time on each thing in any one meeting
• Attendees include those needed to learn, contribute, decide, and no one else
• Pre-work, analysis, and pre-reading to people far enough in advance for all to learn/contribute to their fullest potential – ideally through a single, continuously updated portal/platform
• Meeting participation and timing facilitated to optimize learning, contributions, and action-oriented decisions, ending when the overall objective is achieved
• Meeting notes out promptly (or up on portal/platform) to memorialize decisions and actions, invite other ideas to improve current best thinking, and kick off the preparation for the next meeting as part of continuous feedback loops and adjustments.

The Best Meetings

The best meetings follow basic meeting protocols AND are treated as one of the tools to move projects, programs, and processes forward. They don’t stand alone. They are valuable only in the context the rest of the work and all other methods of communication. Use those different communication methods to accomplish different things along the way:

1. For sharing information broadly, use a single, continuously updated portal/platform.
2. To convey information in more depth, use email.
3. For quick updates, send messages via WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, or the like.
4. When you want to have a conversation and tone helps, do a voice call.
5. When tone and body language matter, do a video call.
6. For the most effective communication, better creative thinking and collaboration, and stronger relationship-building, show up and connect in-person physically, intellectually, and emotionally.

In considering those, weigh the advantages and disadvantages of meeting on chats, phone, video, or live and in-person. Relationships are built live and in-person over time. The other tools are good for more efficient information-sharing and communication.

Let’s look at a couple of use cases.

Flipped Classrooms

As described in an earlier article, flipping the classroom in business meetings involves sharing presentations ahead of meetings so meeting time can be used for learning, debating, ratcheting up current best thinking, and making decisions.

Board Two-Step

As described in a different article, the board two-step is about inviting your board to play a consulting, advisory role as a first step, creating a gap to give them a chance to mull things over, and then coming back to gain their agreement as a second step.

Job Interviews

Any candidate treating a job interview as a discrete meeting is doomed to failure. The only road to success is doing the work in advance to learn about the organization and prepare for the only three interview questions:

1. Will you love the job? (Why do you want the job?) Position the role in terms of the parts of your motivation most relevant to them – what you care about: good for others, good at it, good for me.
2. Can we tolerate working with you? Position the organization in terms of fit with you across behaviors, relationships, attitudes, values, work environment.
3. Can you do the job? Three SiTuation/Action/Results (STAR) examples that highlight your strengths in the areas most important to them re: their key challenges and sources of pride.

Executive Onboarding

The seven stages of executive onboarding are components of a program that contains different sorts of meetings throughout. The overall prescription for new leaders is to converge into the organization before trying to evolve it. The underlying premise behind that is to focus on building relationships before trying to do anything else.

In this and all cases, relationships are built on mutual respect, appreciation, care, and trust. There’s no way that happens in a single, discrete meeting. That happens over time, across all sorts of different interactions.