Act

Last week we talked about how meetings are a proxy for the culture in your organization. In particular, we highlighted engagement, leadership, and accountability as well as the importance of these interactions for collaboration, connection, and relationship building.

One of the more interesting discussions that has emerged post our interviews is whether or not a meeting or interaction is real or fake. By this, it was suggested, that not all meetings are required. The argument for fake meetings is that: we all have too many meetings on our calendars, most of them are unproductive, and most of them don’t make good progress. So, they are probably fake, or not required.

“Fake meetings should be cancelled, if they are repetitive and routine, or you need to figure out how to make them real.” Was the assertion from one executive.

So how do we ascertain if a meeting is Real of Fake?

Scenario

Dave calls an hour-long project team meeting and adds people from a few other functions to cover all bases, just in case they are needed. Dave, shares information and explains the importance of the project to everyone. The team members already involved in the project, nod every so often, while checking emails or preparing for their next meetings. The people from the outside the team are not quite sure why they were included but they take notes to show how engaged they are while trying to stay awake. The meeting concludes right on time and Dave adjourns smiling and noting that he always finishes right on time because of how much he values everyone’s time.

So, real of fake? Here are a few questions to ask yourself about the above scenario, or a recent meeting you attended. Answer these questions at every interaction and you’ll begin to think about meetings in a different way:

Was there a clear agenda and goal for the meeting?
How many people actually spoke during the meeting?
How many people actually participated during the meeting in a discussion about problems needing resolution or was this an illusion of collaboration?
Were there agreed upon actions and outcomes at the conclusion of the meeting?
Could Dave have shared this information in an email or through a collaboration platform?

Our answer: Fake meeting.

Meetings can be incredibly productive and energizing or a seed that causes behavioral complexity. To make sure your interactions are in the former category and not the latter think about changing your approach to meetings. Reset the number, length, purpose, participation and outcome expectations, follow up actions, and accountability.

The following are “must haves” for meeting protocol and decision making. Together they have an exponential impact on results and a positive impact on engagement:

Is the meeting truly necessary?
Set very clear meeting purpose, expectations and decisions to be made at the meeting in the invite.
Create shorter interactions. (Think about a 50% reduction)
Send agenda and materials in advance – ask for confirmation of review before invitees attend the meeting. No review no attendance.
Start and end on time, have a no exceptions policy, maybe?
Include necessary individuals only. The practice of “optional” invitees should be discouraged.
Assign a point person to keep the agenda focused and on track.
Engage all participants.
Monologues should not be allowed.
Action items and responsibilities should be discussed and agreed to before the meeting concludes and confirmed in writing after meeting.

A recent article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) quoted an excerpt from the corporate blog of a senior executive in the pharmaceutical industry:

I believe that our abundance of meetings at our company is the Cultural Tax we pay for the inclusive, learning environment that we want to foster…and I’m ok with that. If the alternative to more meetings is more autocratic decision-making, less input from all levels throughout the organization, and fewer opportunities to ensure alignment and communication by personal interaction, then give me more meetings any time!

Our belief is that meetings can create engagement, leadership, and accountability as well facilitate collaboration, connection, and relationship building. A Cultural Tax is only created when interactions become burdensome, unproductive, and disengaging. The alternative is not autocracy. The alternative is diluted results, time consumption, and frustration.

The answer is simply to design and conduct meetings in a thoughtful way that reaches the desired outcome.

Most organizations go through a formal decision-making process when they allocate resources to a particular initiative or when they develop an annual capital plan. Whenever we chose to allocate money or people to something, organizations typically follow a familiar three step process.

Learn

During the learn phase we are gathering data, building knowledge, and curating information on both the problem at hand and potential solutions. Our goal is to articulate the problem, offer a series of potential solutions and maybe articulate a recommendation or a preferred option.

To achieve this, first we spend time to learn about the presenting issue. We conduct extensive research, do analysis, run focus groups and interviews to make sure we fully understand the issues and problems that need to be solved. In a nutshell, the goal is to figure out who our customer is, what needs they have, and how best can we serve them.

Second, once we have identified the issues, we can begin to look at alternative solutions. We analyze the various merits of each solution and develop a cost benefit analysis of each option so we can think about how to best make a recommendation. If our solution includes a third party, for example a piece of technology or software, we will likely do additional diligence to measure things like functionality, integration, and relationships. We’d be inclusive of different stakeholder groups so that we had the opportunity to obtain a broad set of inputs on the final set of answers.

Finally, we prepare our presentation with our findings and recommendation.

Decide

Decision rights for capital spending typically sit with an executive team or a subset thereof. The team doing the “learning” will make their presentation to the executive team and make their recommendation. Usually there is some back and forth discussion, maybe the team has to go away and answer some additional questions but eventually the decision is made to either support or not support the capital allocation.

Once approval has been obtained the team can then move onto the implementation of the solution. The work to solve the problem can now begin.

The Problem

As you can imagine this governance and decision-making process takes a significant amount of time. There are four distinct problems with this approach.

First, with a fast-paced business environment and innovation driving new ways of working, new technologies, and new possibilities it’s more than possible to create capabilities that don’t meet future needs.

Second, the learn phase never quite achieves what you intend it to. There always seems to be a series of “gotchas’ during the act phase. These lead to budget overages, time delays, and the reduction of scope. This is because we don’t know what we don’t know and only through experience can we solve this paradox.

Third, the learn phase doesn’t typically consider the difficulty in driving adoption of a new capability. Skills may need to be developed, behaviors changed, and reliance on old operating procedures need to be undone.

Finally, according to the National Training Laboratory, action-based learning results in three times the retention and understanding as passive based learning, Acting therefore contributes more to learning than simply reading or researching.

An Alternative

One of our principles is to move into action sooner rather than later. We encourage clients to learn by doing so they can better understand the presented issues, potential solutions, and behaviors that will need to be changed to drive adoption of the new capability.

Another principle we live by is to break down a problem into more manageable chunks and work to solve each of them over time. This is grounded in the fact that you want to avoid any kind of “Big Bang” implementation. Better to implement a series of smaller changes rather than one large one.

We prefer a series of small success rather than a death march that results in mediocrity.

Our suggestion therefore is to change the governance and decision-making process to help improve adoption, reduce risk, and create momentum

With the overall goal in mind, work towards taking smaller steps, learn as you go, and then decide which appropriate steps to take next. This iterative approach allows you to uncover and resolve what you don’t know about what you don’t know.