Audit Your Meetings: The Concorde Engineer’s Rule for Time That Counts
“Only have meetings (in person or online) standing up.” That was the brisk advice from my 93-year-old aero engineer father about how he personally ‘time and efficiency’ managed team meetings back in the 1950s when he was working on the development of a certain aircraft later to be named Concorde.
There was an urgency to his work – and to those times, with the rebuilding of Britain and that of hope in the decade after World War II. He and his contemporaries would find the runaway meeting culture of today incredulous, insane and completely counterproductive to …… productivity. They were too excited and stimulated about the future to waste time. Too much to do – too little time.
Today however a whole industry has grown up teaching organisations how to ‘do’ meetings well. Many organisations spend huge amounts creating templates for effective ‘meeting’ strategies and procedures.
I know, because I’ve sat through many hours of the end results of these by well-meaning folk who have come to love the diverse opportunities meeting time gives them in their working life – that actually have nothing to do with their work.
Is this meeting driving decisions — or just draining time?
From time-wasting to time well spent: proven practices that work
The quest to have efficient meetings has spawned a trend of pre-meeting meetings and agenda-setting meetings and agenda items to post-mortem a meeting just held. To the frustration of colleagues some people use their ever growing meeting schedule as just more space to opine, showboat, position, intellectualise and sometimes even to silence or cow colleagues – always in the name of ticking the boxes of connecting, sharing and engaging – these words becoming a justification for having yet more meetings and for much obfuscation that’s got nothing to do with getting a job done.
OK I’m being harsh, but I work with all size clients in both the public and private sector and the problem is endemic. Good meeting management is the exception not the rule.
These are some best practice examples I’ve gleaned from the chiefs and chairs I work with that do run good meetings:
- Insist meetings work at pace
- Set strict criteria and define outcome being sought in one sentence
- Question what does all being together (either physically or online) add to achieving this outcome?
- Send out summaries of pre-reading with the time required to read same so attendees can schedule the time to be appropriately informed. Assume all background reading has been done and fiercely question and resist temptations to have presentations within meetings.
- Identify the purpose and reason for every person invited to the meeting – what is the expectation of their contribution? If it’s just to receive information, could they listen to a recording later instead – while driving or at the gym. Would a meeting summary suffice? Could another representative provide a quick debrief phone call afterwards?
- Add up the sobering cost of the time of the participants in the room and equate it to what that would otherwise pay for within the business. Take it a step further and ask what they could have been doing instead that would have given better added value.
Setting pragmatic criteria and a brisk firm meeting etiquette quickly exposes any time wasting or futile exchanges during it.
To be frank the issue at the heart of the problem is nearly always in the chairing. I work with some amazing chairs – and the outcomes they get from their appropriately – attended and run meetings is incredible. Just let’s not talk about the popular CEO of a notable organisation who has given up trying to change the culture therein and confessed to me they allot the time-wasting periods in a weekly meeting to place their online supermarket order!
