As long as there have been people, there have been meetings. One-on-one meetings; team meetings; organization-wide, all-hands-on-deck meetings; check-in meetings; weekly update meetings; and many more. There have been meetings about meetings. Meetings on how to conduct meetings. Meetings to eliminate meetings.
In the nearly four decades I have been working, all types of meetings continue to proliferate, but many more of them today have a spreadsheet focus that minimizes or eliminates the story aspect.
This needs to change. In an era when interactions in the workplace are increasingly digital and transaction oriented, we need to inject more life into our meetings. Instead of being part of the boring routine, they need to become meaningful and memorable. In this way, they can help people become more valued as employees and more excited about the tasks they perform.
Let’s start by looking at the nature of meetings and how they’ve evolved so that we tolerate them at best and dread them at worst.
All about the Data
If you’ve been working in organizations for a sustained period of time, you’ve noticed that your meetings have changed. In the old days, let’s say ten or twenty years ago, meetings were looser and their content more varied. While they may have been run by bosses and organized through agendas, they often could veer off topic. Participants might become involved in heated exchanges. Meetings could start out organized and logical and devolve into free-for-alls. At times, they were chaotic. At times, they produced great ideas through free-form discussions.
I’m not suggesting meetings were better years ago—they were often boring, dragged on endlessly, and were used to further someone’s agenda or scapegoat someone. They certainly weren’t always efficient. They were, however, more human.
Today, new technologies have greatly impacted meetings. Given almost universal access to screens and improved conferencing and connection apps (Skype, Hangouts, Chat, Slack, etc.), being in the room for a meeting is no longer as common or necessary as it once was. As a result, some or all participants are communicating from different locations. Just as significant, when people are in the same room, they are often staring at screens rather than at each other.
Add to the mix an increasingly global workplace, accelerated work pace, and a growing number of remote workers, and you have a recipe for meeting metamorphosis:
MORE VOLUME; LESS IMPORTANCE. As the work pace has quickened, meetings have proliferated because people need to check in more often to ensure coordination of effort. In a more connected, more collaborative world, the invitee list to meetings has expanded, since more people have ownership of a given issue. Plus, meeting software makes it easy to convene people, especially because invitees don’t have to be there physically. Invariably, these frequent, “crowded” meetings are often focused on issues of secondary or tertiary importance; in the past, they would have been handled by Miguel walking down the hallway to Sheila’s office.
MORE PROCESS DRIVEN; LESS PURPOSEFUL. Meetings tend to be about getting work done rather than how to get better at doing the work. They are increasingly about informing and aligning rather than improving and inspiring. They focus on meeting numerical criteria (deadlines, percentage increases, etc.), and they pay scant attention to quality of work or long-term goals.
MORE TIME; LESS ATTENTION. Most people tolerate meetings rather than look forward to them as opportunities to develop ideas and relationships. They are similar to boring classes in school—we’re constantly looking at the clock.
As a result, we denigrate meetings. We complain about how they’re destroying productivity, taking over calendars, and need to be eliminated. There is a veritable cottage industry of books, seminars, and consultants that proffer advice on solving the plague and pestilence of participatory gatherings. They suggest reducing the number of meetings, limiting the participants, using technology as an information-sharing substitute for meetings, and so on. All good suggestions that focus on increasing productivity via meeting alternatives and alterations, but they miss a key point.
Too often, most meetings are about data. Sharing it. Interrogating it. Aligning around it. They are about the spreadsheet side of business.
These meetings miss the opportunity to integrate story into the mix. They fail to provide a forum to communicate the story of the business—the story of how people are growing in the business. They don’t create unusual combinations of employees, giving someone in finance the chance to interact and form a relationship with someone in marketing. They don’t allow for chance interactions and unplanned collaborations.
In many ways we are the accumulation of the places we have been and the people we have met. Meetings both planned and ad hoc, large and one-on-one, help determine who we are as professionals.
Organizations need to be proactive in creating policies that promote meaningful meetings, that help people develop their abilities rather than bide their time. Instead of letting meetings plan employee days, we should plan meetings that let our days be as meaningful as possible.
Five Types of Meaningful Meetings
When you think about it, meetings vary considerably. They range from spontaneous, involving only a few people, to regularly scheduled, large, formal gatherings. Some last for hours and others for just minutes; some are highly focused with clear goals and others are wide-ranging and open-ended.
And some are primarily about story, while others are about spreadsheet.
All this is fine. What’s not fine is when one type dominates, and in recent years, spreadsheet meetings have been dominant. Too often the large, regularly scheduled, agenda-driven meetings have become the norm, and their emphasis on data-based outcomes has created a spreadsheet-story imbalance. How many meetings have you attended that were about detailing and debating data points? About discussing numerical objectives? About fine-tuning budgets?
These are necessary and can be valuable, but organizations need to do a better job of integrating story. To facilitate that, consider the following five types of meetings that are meaningful and relationship-focused:
Unknown Meetings
These are meetings with individuals who are unknown or little-known to employees. For instance, people who are looking for advice, sharing new ideas, or interested in meeting someone for other reasons (e.g., a friend or colleague recommended they should meet). This meeting could be with one person or a small group. It should not be with someone who is trying to sell something. That’s because the value of these meetings is that they stimulate fresh and creative thinking. Their goal is often learning, and a side benefit is forging a relationship that may prove valuable to the organization. In a sales situation, learning is not the goal, and relationships are often predicated upon a purchase.
Unknown meetings help people voyage outside of their bubbles. Over the years, these meetings have led me to people I have wanted to hire, who taught me about things I had no idea existed—or that they insisted would be a “big deal” in the future (I first heard about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in this type of meeting). Some didn’t yield anything substantive in terms of practical learning or relationships, but they opened my mind to ideas and possibilities that I would never have considered otherwise.
“Can You Help?” Meetings
Here the purpose is to provide assistance without receiving anything in return—at least anything tangible and immediate. In reality, you receive other people’s gratitude and willingness to go the extra mile for you in the future. I’d argue that you get more than you give from these types of meetings.
As I have grown more senior and well-known, I spend a lot of time helping people who are between jobs, students, and colleagues grappling with particular challenges. They are surprised that I am accessible and willing to give them my time. I remind them that I am getting as much out of the meeting as they are—the satisfaction of passing on whatever learning and wisdom I’ve acquired over the years.
“Can you help?” meetings are opportunities for people to give back to their organizational communities, whether one-on-one or to larger groups. They help people feel good about what they’ve accomplished, the expertise they’ve developed. Givers emerge from these meetings with a renewed sense of purpose, and receivers emerge with knowledge that can help them do their jobs better.
Woodshed Meetings
As the name implies, these are instances where you have to reprimand, warn, or punish people. Yes, this may seem like an odd meeting type to include in the story category. Most of us hate disciplining others even more than we hate being disciplined. Emotion-filled, pressure-laden, and unpleasant in other ways, these meetings are challenging.
But it’s much better to have these meetings than avoid them. In spreadsheet-dominant companies, the culture often gives tacit permission to avoid woodsheds. These meetings are messy emotionally, and numbers-focused people don’t like mess. As a result, people are often allowed to continue down the wrong path—no one confronts them about their mistakes or attitudes or lays out a meaningful plan of improvement. Meetings often lack the straight talk and emotion necessary to catalyze behavioral change. Employees are allowed to function at a marginal (or worse) level for a sustained period of time. Perhaps they receive warnings or reprimands, but they don’t improve and are eventually let go. The organization, however, tolerates mediocrity for months—or longer.
Woodshed meetings determine our success or failure. They provide the opportunity to help people change, learn, and grow rather than retire in place or exist for months or years as marginal contributors. Whether it’s conferring one-on-one with a problematic employee or speaking with a team that isn’t delivering results, these meetings represent opportunities to get people back on track.
Jerry McGuire–Inspired Meetings
In the movie of the same name, the protagonist storms out of his workplace spewing harsh, angry truths. While it was entertaining (for movie viewers) to see Tom Cruise vent, organizations should not encourage similar practices. If a Jerry McGuire–like employee did the same thing in your office, it would be disruptive in a negative sense—it would hurt morale and probably cause other employees to start sending out their résumés.
Instead of public venting, Jerry should have discussed his issues in a frank, one-on-one meeting with his boss or with senior leaders, where he could speak truth to power.
We often are scared of going to management and telling them harsh truths. It’s tough to inform leaders that they’ve missed something or that they are putting profits before their people. As someone who mustered the courage to have these meetings with senior people earlier in my career, and who has been on the receiving end later, I know they can be uncomfortable experiences.
Generally, however, people emerge from these meetings with greater respect for their bosses, and bosses usually emerge with greater respect for the honesty and courage of their people. Just as important, critical issues surface that may otherwise have simmered for months before boiling over. These meetings allow people to tell their stories—to express what they’ve experienced and the perspectives they’ve formed. Their opinions may not always be right, but the meeting itself gets their story heard, which is an excellent goal in and of itself.
“Let’s Get a Beer” Meetings
These have no agenda; they are designed to allow people to catch up with each other. Informal and spontaneous, they build morale and camaraderie. Whether it’s going out for beers or lunch or coffee or other social activities, these types of get-togethers build relationships, allow employees to see one another as individuals rather than as colleagues, direct reports, supervisors, specialists, etc. Even if nothing related to work is discussed in these agenda-free meetings, the organization benefits. People work best when they know, like, and trust their colleagues, and beer meetings help achieve this objective.
I have also found that when gathering a group for a beer meeting, having fun activities can enhance the proceedings. At Starcom IP, whenever we had a beer meeting, everybody who had just joined the team had to “justify their existence” as to why they were special enough to join our group, and a senior employee had to “justify” what they had done recently to be good enough to stay. This way we learned about each other and our work with minimal formality.
Foster a Spirit of Generosity
In many organizations, the meeting leader is selfish—not in personality but in outcomes. The people who run meetings are usually focused on what they can get out of the people in attendance—how to help them achieve data-driven goals.
This is the main reason people resent and sometimes avoid meetings. Instead of looking only at what we can get out of meetings, we need to also think of what we can give. When we value a meeting by how much we can help others, no meeting is wasted. Too often, leaders and managers spend the majority of their meeting time imparting information. As necessary as this may be, this implied transaction (“I’ll give you the data; you give me the results”) is a poor basis for a meaningful meeting. Much of this information distribution could be done digitally.
Instead, focus on the following generous meeting goals:
KNOWLEDGE. Information is data and facts; knowledge is distilled wisdom and meaning. The first can be contained in a spreadsheet. The latter’s vessel is a story. Storytelling—through personal examples, historical reference, and relevance to the listener—should be the operating principle for how team leaders communicate to meeting participants. Helping them have “aha!” moments of understanding is all about knowledge; perfunctory head nods are all about inputting data.
GUIDANCE. Most people leave meetings with marching orders—tasks to complete in a certain way by a certain date. I’m not saying you can ignore to-dos. But the concept of giving people a compass for guidance, rather than a list of exact directions, means you provide participants with both tools and a certain amount of freedom to use them. This is empowering; people are grateful that their bosses trust them to achieve outcomes using their own initiative. A compass ensures that they don’t get lost when exploring solutions on their own. I usually try to leave people with a tool kit of sorts to take away with them. This may be some combination of reference materials (books, websites, etc.), techniques (recall my earlier “three words to build your brand”), and other people to meet.
APPRECIATION. Give people the gift of appreciation. You discern their point of view. You know where they are coming from. This requires listening carefully and watching for emotion and body language, not just words. When people leave meetings feeling like you “get them”—their fears, hopes, and ideas—they move forward with confidence and enthusiasm.
RELEVANCE. The meeting should be about them, not you. Even if you share your own knowledge and experience, it should be relevant to their needs and situation. Self-love in storytelling does not help the other person. Think in advance about what will be most significant to meeting participants—the stories, tools, and ideas to which they are most likely to resonate.
To put these generous principles into action, meeting leaders should adopt what I refer to as a LIFT mindset: Listen, Interact, Feel, Transform:
LISTEN. Open a meeting by listening to the person or people with whom you are meeting. Resist the urge to lecture or criticize or drown participants in information. Where are they coming from and what do they want from this meeting? Find that out before you focus on your agenda.
INTERACT. Allot time for questions when you’re done speaking. Too often, people leave meetings frustrated because they never had a chance to respond to the information or the assignments made by meeting leaders. A question period allows people to provide you with feedback about what you’re telling them as well as focus the conversation on issues that concern them and will help them accomplish meeting goals more effectively.
FEEL. Are you responding emotionally to the meeting discussion or more like a spreadsheet-focused robot? If you’re talking about the need to downsize, are you allowing people to see that you’re upset or sad? Meetings shouldn’t only be about matters of the mind but about heart and spirit. Showing feeling and conveying that you understand their feelings creates resonance that has more value than subject-matter relevance.
TRANSFORM. Perhaps the most generous thing you can do in a meeting is help other people think, feel, and do things differently. You are giving attendees a fresh perspective, a better sense of what customers want, a new approach for a challenging problem. This isn’t the easiest goal, but it’s one worth striving for. By helping others see and act differently, you may also be giving yourself the gift of transformation. By pushing others to explore alternatives and shift perspectives, you confront your own ways of seeing and may open your mind to fresh possibilities.
Establish Empathy
Do people leave meetings feeling like you and other participants have walked in their shoes? Do they believe that you “get it” and “get them”? If you’re just acknowledging their data (the dates they’ve targeted, the percentage increase they’ve achieved, the budget they required) but failing to communicate that you grasp what their concerns and hopes are, then they will leave meetings feeling dissatisfied at best, disgusted at worst.
Creating empathy in a meeting means not just getting what other people are feeling but communicating that you get it. You can do this with a group as well as an individual, and you can do it through both words and gestures. Sometimes, a knowing nod or locking eyes with another person can help them see you understand what they’re feeling. In group settings, however, words are crucial.
Here are ways leaders can establish empathy:
UNDERSTANDING. Listen carefully and ask follow-up questions to ensure that you truly understand the issue. Three questions I ask are (1) What else is bothering or troubling you? (2) Why do you think this is an issue? and (3) If you could solve this, what would you do? Probing the causes and possible solutions of a problem ensure that everyone understands the real problem.
In some meetings team leaders say they understand, but participants know this is a surface understanding at best. “I understand your complaints that the customer is being belligerent, but you have to figure out how to deal with his attitude and please him to the point that he stops being so belligerent,” a leader might say. Participants, though, feel this customer has crossed the line, that he’s been abusive, that he is impossible to work with, and that only an intervention from the team leader and the customer’s boss will remedy the problem.
REFRAMING. Put what you hear in an illuminating context. Share examples or analogies that help participants know that you grasp what they’re facing and that this situation isn’t unique. Ask yourself where you have seen or heard about this situation before. This may provide a way to reframe the problem or opportunity in a way that shines a spotlight on a given issue.
PERSONALIZING. Empathy is not about a general situation but a particular person. Make what you say personal: “A few years ago, I was dealing with a similar problem at Company XYZ. It was making me crazy, and I thought I was going to be fired until I did some research and . . .”
People relish stories that go beyond dry case histories. They love meeting leaders who are willing to be vulnerable and transparent about their own past situations that relate to the matter at hand. Sometimes it’s appropriate to share a story where you overcame obstacles and achieved a goal. But it’s just as effective (maybe more effective) to communicate a mistake you made or a failure you endured and what you learned.
As I suggested earlier, empathy is not just what you say but what you show. It is about tone of voice. It is about silences. It’s as much about what is not said as what is verbalized. It is about not looking at your watch. It is about body language and gestures. It is not about what you say but how you say things. It is not about whether you listen but how you listen. It is not about what you react to but how you react.
In meetings, leaders can be abrupt, impatient, dismissive, and myopically focused on ticking off items on their agenda. They may think they’re being empathic because they ask questions of others and solicit their ideas, but they negate what they say by what they show. Empathy is about feelings more than anything else, and feelings are often signaled in nonverbal ways.
Therefore, be open and patient during meetings, conscious of your tone of voice and body language and whether they’re projecting openness and patience. Don’t fidget or stare daggers or keep checking your watch. Don’t let your body say one thing and your voice another.
As Maya Angelou wrote, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”1
Generating Energy
For every meeting I lead, I have a consistent goal: ensuring that the participants leave the meeting more energized than when they entered.
We all have experienced meetings that drag on interminably, and sometimes even an hour-long meeting can feel like an eternity. When people exit the room, they are enervated. More than that, they may be dispirited, confused, and scared. For a number of reasons, the meeting sapped their initiative and energy, and they struggle to execute their meeting-assigned tasks well or with much enthusiasm and creativity.
If generosity ensures that attendees will depart the meeting believing that their requirements have been addressed, and if empathy helps them feel that they’ve been heard and understood, energy provides them with the drive to accomplish tasks at a high level.
By energy, I do not mean that you or the participants have to emerge with high fives and gung-ho, charge-the-hill attitudes. Instead, you turn the meeting into an energy source by offering clarity, belief, and a plan.
Clarity
The worst thing about a meeting is coming away more confused than when you went in. People hedge, obfuscate, fill meetings with buzzword bingo (e.g., disrupt, transformation, platform), and generally circle around an issue like a jetliner circling a busy airport but never landing. They cite statistics ad nauseum, and the combination of too much data (some of it redundant, some of it contradictory, a lot of it confusing) and too much nonsense causes participants to feel like they don’t understand whatever was being conveyed.
To avoid this, I try to restate the problem or issue in three or fewer points. Ideally, a simple sentence suffices. I work hard to distill, to find the core versus the fluff. When people can grab on to a clear, concise articulation of an issue, they feel good. More than that, they can derive energy from clarity. It’s galvanizing for them to feel like they get it.
One recommended technique: listen carefully for both words and emotion. At some point during the meeting someone will express a thought that is emotionally deep, but the words will be vague or convoluted or hard to grasp. Emotional depth combined with inarticulate expression is often a sign of a critical issue. Pay attention and use that information to help clarify the real takeaway from the meeting.
Belief
Do people believe they are capable of tackling the issue, of solving the problem, of capitalizing on the opportunity? Many times leaders assign tasks to individuals or teams, and they secretly believe they’re in over their heads. While this may be true in some instances, it’s often just reflexive anxiety about a challenging assignment.
To counteract this eminently human response, communicate that you believe in them and their abilities. It is as simple as letting them know you are in their corner and see in them strength and capabilities they may not see.
You can also bolster belief by sharing stories of how others tackled this issue successfully or how you faced a similar situation while wondering whether you could handle it. Stories dramatize as well as humanize situations, allowing people who doubt their abilities to recognize that they’re not the only ones who didn’t believe in themselves—and others handled a task effectively despite initial anxiety.
When people believe, they are emboldened. They have confidence. They can draw on their belief to move forward and power through obstacles that would otherwise stop them in their tracks.
A Plan
People have the energy to move forward when they have a clear and viable map to get them where they want to go. When participants exit a meeting, leave them with steps to take to create forward momentum. It may not be the ultimate plan to solving the problem, but it’s an interim plan for taking action. This is sometimes referred to as “chunking” work into doable blocks.
Help people leave with the answers to: What now? What next? What to do? It may be as simple as suggesting the first step, whether that is to research a topic, or interview an expert, or go online and find a supplier who can help. You can also schedule a follow-up meeting to assess progress. Making sure team participants understand the immediate steps to take following the meeting (and making sure those steps are doable) will leave them eager to get started.
A Small but Significant Meeting
Perhaps the most common type of meeting is the one between a boss and a direct report. Many times these meetings are short and task oriented, but others can delve into deeper issues. Some bosses use these meetings negatively, exhibiting bullying behavior, and other bosses are so spreadsheet oriented that they avoid any transparency, vulnerability, and empathy. Today these meetings are especially sensitive given cases of harassment and bullying by senior management.
I’d like to share an example of a boss who focused such a meeting on the story side of things. I’ll warn you that this was not a politically correct interaction by today’s standards, but back then people were less sensitive to these types of issues, so don’t focus on what may seem like ethnic profiling.
In 1983, after a year in my job as a media buyer for the Leo Burnett Company, I had just received a stellar work review from my media supervisor and had been invited by her boss, Don, the media director, to stop by his office for a chat.
Don began our meeting by noting that I was doing a terrific job as a media buyer and that I brought a new level of analytical rigor, discipline, and drive to every task. He also said that I got along with everyone, actively sought new assignments, and took initiative.
As I was basking in this praise, Don asked me to close the door. I did so, and then I heard him say, “I am sorry to say that you are unlikely to be as successful as your skills and drive should ideally make you, because you are too different and people will not be comfortable with you.”
The implication, of course, was that my dark skin and Indian ancestry would work against me as I attempted to move up the career ladder. Don outlined a number of obstacles that I would face:
• I failed to indulge in small talk with clients or with any of my colleagues. I focused my conversation on work or world events. I came off as always serious. My personality would tend to limit hanging out, going for beers, etc.
• I didn’t understand the culture of the United States, and it showed. I knew US history but did not understand baseball, football, or a host of other things. All my colleagues had gone to US colleges, and I had attended school in India. It was hard for them to relate to me on any topic besides work. People liked me but had me pegged as a serious, monotrack worker bee.
• I needed to take more risks, speak up more even if I was not sure of the answer. Don noted that “bullshitting” is part of the American business style.
As you might imagine, I was stunned and mortified by Don’s articulation of these obstacles. At the same time, I recognized that he was not telling me these things because he was mean-spirited. Despite their political incorrectness by today’s standards, his words and his body language reflected his essential kindness; Don was known throughout the agency as being a soft-spoken gentleman.
Don moved on from the obstacles I faced to how I might overcome them. “I believe all of these issues are fixable,” he said. “And I personally will help you overcome these obstacles if you accept what I have said is true and if you are willing to commit to addressing them.”
I croaked out, “Yes, of course,” still reeling but seeing light at the end of the tunnel.
Don laid out the plan he had created for me. It was, as you’ll see, highly personal and unusual. It involved me committing to going to two sports events monthly (since we were in the media business, we got free tickets), accompanying his kids and some of my colleagues to college campuses in the Midwest and watching movies about college life, becoming a member of certain clubs (my boss facilitated my memberships), and a list of to-dos that had no relation to media planning, handling clients, or marketing.
I may have been initially upset during the meeting, but I left energized. Why?
First, Don provided clarity by speaking directly and specifically about my problems.
Second, he expressed his belief that I could be successful, and he was willing to take the time to help me fix my problems.
Third, he created a plan of action, even though it seemed strange to me to be required to see movies, attend ball games, and join clubs.
Fourth, Don exhibited generosity through taking the time to display his concern about my career in the company.
There was no reason for a very senior director to take a meeting with a junior employee. There was no reason for him to address issues that would impact my career in the future but had no impact on my productivity in the present. And there was no reason to spend the time and expend the effort to help me address obstacles.
But Don turned what is often a spreadsheet-type meeting into one that was also about story. He treated me as a person, not just as an employee. He taught me two things I always remember: (1) tell people where they stand, and (2) suggest and show them ways to improve.
It was a meeting that I am convinced provided the catalyst for what became a highly successful career.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• The received wisdom of minimizing meetings and only going to ones that create value for you is wrong. More meetings create more opportunities for productive relationships.
• Meetings aren’t just about numbers but also about people. To capitalize on the collective capacity of meeting attendees, managers should use the full range of LIFT tools at their disposal: Listen, Interact, Feel, and Transform.
• To make the most out of meetings, understand what type of meeting you are in, so you know how to listen empathetically, give generously, and leave people inspired and energized.