FINANCE

The leadership series: The cure for "death by meeting"

May 2007

Are your meetings downright deadly? Over the years there has been no better source of inspiration on ways to transform a lifeless meeting into an engaging, passionate, and profitable experience than Patrick Lencioni.

Patrick is a best-selling business author, acclaimed public speaker, and the founder and president of The Table Group, Inc., a management-consulting firm that focuses on organizational health. His books include Silos, Politics and Turf Wars, The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive, The Five Temptations of a CEO, and Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team. Today he joins Cognos Senior Writer Kelsey Howarth to share some thoughts from his best-seller Death by Meeting.

You know your meetings are bad when...

KH: You say that bad meetings are the most painful problem in business. How does a company know if its meetings have become deadly?

PL: "If they're boring, that's a good sign that they're problematic. If people dread going to them, that's a pretty good sign. People should look forward to going to meetings and they should not be bored when they're there.

"Good meetings are where the real work gets done. When people perceive meetings as something they do instead of work, that's a big problem."

When people say they don't like meetings it's like surgeons saying they don't like operating on people or professional hockey players saying they don't like the games.

For most of us in business, meetings are what we do. We get together in a room, make decisions, and discuss things.

Good meetings are where the real work gets done. When people perceive meetings as something they do instead of work, that's a big problem."

Good meetings are like good movies

KH: You have a theory that a good meeting is like a good movie. How so?

PL: "A great movie hooks its audience early – within the first 10 minutes – and has enough drama to hold their attention. There should be real conflict taking place with something worth caring about at stake. And in the end, there should be some sort of resolution."

KH: Encouraging conflict and drama in a meeting would seem like a hard sell. Don't most managers feel that it's their role to smooth conflict and limit the drama in meetings?

"A great movie hooks its audience early and has enough drama to hold their attention. There should be real conflict taking place with something worth caring about at stake."

PL: "Exactly, which is why meetings are so boring. The truth is meetings aren't supposed to be easy and comfortable. They're supposed to be places where difficult decisions are made.

If you take the drama and the conflict out, you're not going to be talking about the right things or getting to the heart of the issue. You're not going to engage people and get the best from them either."

Getting lost in "meeting stew"

KH: We recently spoke with Sonax Group president David Axson, who thinks that a fundamental mistake organizations make in their yearly plans and budgets is too much detail. Strategic plans get lost in a host of trivial expense line items. In Death by Meeting you mention this is a common mistake in meetings as well.

PL: "Absolutely. Most companies have one big meeting every week and they wonder why it doesn't work. I refer to it as 'meeting stew.' They throw every potential ingredient into this one big staff meeting.

I like to compare it to what couples often do at home. They're standing in front of the bathroom mirror brushing their teeth, while trying to decide where to go on vacation, what to get for dinner, who's picking up the kids, whether one of the kids should go to a councilor, and whether they should have another baby, all in the same conversation.

The truth is that human beings cannot process information on all those different levels in the same conversation. When it comes to meetings the same is true. We need to be clearer about why we're having them and provide the proper place to discuss strategic and tactical issues, but not all at the same time."

Four types of meetings

KH: Can you explain the four types of meetings you recommend?

PL: "The four different kinds of meetings I recommend are the daily check-in, the weekly tactical, the monthly strategic, and the quarterly offsite review.

The daily check-in is just that, a quick huddle to find out what everybody is doing. There's no agenda and no problem solving, just a basic social check-in so people know what their team members are doing.

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The second kind is a weekly tactical meeting, which is where people talk about how the team is doing against near-term goals.

This is the place they can discuss the problems they need to resolve to accomplish those goals. It's not about strategy or brainstorming – it's about solving problems that are holding the team back.

The third kind of is the monthly strategic or topical meeting. You take one big topic that will have an impact on your future and spend two hours or more wrestling it to the ground.

These meetings are fun because they're focused on solving a big problem. People brainstorm, push each other, and really draw on their unique perspectives and various levels of experience.

The last kind of meeting is a quarterly off-site review. This sort of meeting has often become a boondoggle – with exotic locations and too many social activities. These meetings are costly and rarely provide a lasting benefit.

For me, the quarterly offsite lets people step back from the business, take a breath, and re-assess where they stand.

The topic can be anything – competitors, the market, what your best employees are doing – anything. The function is to help people regain perspective and view the business in a more holistic, long-term manner. It's about slowing down to go fast."

Get the right data, make difficult decisions

KH: Our customers say time and again that the value of Cognos for meetings is giving them an agreed-upon version of the truth. Sound metrics, scorecards, and plans let them stop debating numbers and move on to deeper issues.

PL: "The data that Cognos brings to the table is very important because it allows people to stop wading through details. It informs them about what's really going on. Then they can have those difficult conversations and make the decisions that no amount of data will make for them."

"Ultimately, big decisions come down to judgment, discussion, and insight. Cognos allows people to focus on the real issues and it gives them the context and information they need to aid in their qualitative and intuitive decision-making."