Zero-Point Creations

The Two-Pizza Rule. Daily Stand-ups. Pre-meeting huddles. Quarterly recurring meeting purges.

Everyone seems to think they’ve discovered the ONE THING that will make their next meeting the one that will become the template for their company going forward. The problem with this approach is it’s not a single ingredient fix: it’s a multi-ingredient sauce that has the same BASIC ingredients every time but must be tweaked to the tastes of the individual participants.

The recipe may remain the same…but the nuances will and should change.

So what makes me an authority on the Secret Sauce of meetings? The COUNTLESS wasted hours, lost productivity, disengaged employees, “circling back”, “putting a pin in it” and “breakout sessions” that accomplished precisely nothing other than burning payroll dollars. It drove me to start radical experiments to discover the things I could change that would actually move the needle and make meetings not only tolerable, but beneficial and (dare I suggest it) necessary.

So, with no further ado, get our your recipe cards:

Ingredient 1 – Have an agenda
If you’re on my team and think a meeting is necessary, you need to create and provide an agenda ahead of time to each participant. If we show up and there’s no agenda, the meeting is immediately cancelled. If you are not able to take the few minutes necessary to give everyone both some context and the opportunity to prepare, it can’t possibly be that important.

Ingredient 2 – Appoint a timekeeper and topic watcher
Every single team I’ve ever been on has at least one person that jealously guards their time (why is everyone looking at me?). This is NOT a bad thing; in fact, it’s an extremely good way to make sure you stay on topic. “Topic creep” happens no matter how organized you try to be. A quality timekeeper helps keep things on topic. They also can share 30-minute and 15-minute warnings with the meeting organizer/leader. If you spend more than 5-10 minutes on a topic unrelated to the meeting, it’s time to determine whether or not the topic is truly worth ANOTHER meeting or if it’s unnecessary fluff.

Ingredient 3 – Respect everyone’s time
As the meeting organizer, you might feel like you have more to discuss than can be covered in the time allotted. Too bad. I don’t care if you’re the CEO (in fact, I’ll judge you more harshly if you are), you have a responsibility to the people in the room to respect their time. Start on time. End on time (or ideally 5 minutes early). Every single person in the room is letting tasks go unfinished, missing calls, falling behind on emails and skipping meals to be here. Your time is NOT more important than theirs.

Ingredient 4 – Be aware of Parkinson’s law
Back in the 1950’s, a naval historian by the name of C. Northcote Parkinson published his observation that “work will expand to fill the time allotted for its completion.” He must have been sitting through a board meeting that was scheduled for 2 hours but should have been over in 30 minutes. Follow your agenda and call it quits! You just gave everyone time back in their day; I promise you, you will be the hero.

Ingredient 5 – You don’t need more than 90 minutes
Seriously, you don’t. If you genuinely believe you need more than 90 minutes, you haven’t done an adequate job compartmentalizing the work that needs to be done or the topics that need to be covered. Carefully pick your topics, your attendees, and your timeframe. You will get more done in less time if you take just a moment to think it through before you send that meeting invite.

Ingredient 6 – No piggyback meetings
If I hear one more person say at the end of a meeting “since I have you guys here…” I might flip a conference room table. Just stop. See Ingredients 1, 2 and 3. Schedule your own meeting, get an agenda together and formalize what you want to talk about. Don’t try to skip the recipe because it’s convenient – you’ll ruin the sauce! There is no such thing as a “quick 5-minute meeting” that you didn’t plan for – it will ALWAYS go longer than expected and will rarely end with useful learnings or action items.

Ingredient 7 – The highest-ranked person should speak the least (and preferably last)
If you’re the boss, you’re paying smart people good money to use their expertise to help grow your business. Why would you ever assume that you should dictate to them instead of listening to their concerns, hearing their new ideas or seeing a perspective you weren’t even aware existed? If you say something (no matter HOW collaborative you think your environment is), the team is much more likely to follow your lead instead of come up with new ideas.

Ingredient 8 – Skip the “lunch and learn”
Nobody wants another average cheese pizza, giant sandwich or greasy pasta bowl. If the only time you can find for everyone to meet is during a lunch hour, you need to shrink your invite list or look for another day. Despite what the labor law states, we all know most salaried workers don’t actually get a lunch hour – they work straight through, wolf down some food at their desk and hope to get to their next 100 tasks before they fall any further behind. When they do actually get to take 15-30 minutes for lunch (nobody gets an hour, let’s be real), they might want to go for a walk, call their mechanic, check in with their kid’s teacher, actually sit down and eat some food or just sit quietly and recharge their mental and emotional energies. Don’t rob them of that because you found the one “easy” spot that everyone was “free”.

Ingredient 9 – “Status updates” are emails, not meetings
Seriously, you know it’s true. Don’t let your ego convince you that the only way people are going to understand what you need to share is by getting them all in a room. Monthly/weekly/daily status updates are HUGELY important. Put them in your dashboard or in an email. Recapture that lost time and repurpose it towards revenue generating activities.

Ingredient 10 – Every meeting ends with action items
With very few exceptions, everyone invited to a meeting should leave that meeting with action items related to the topic at hand. If you want to invite someone but can’t think of how they’ll contribute or what they’ll need to work on that’s directly related to the project, you probably don’t need to have them their.

If you start to work with these ingredients and keep going even if you get some pushback (people hate change), I promise you’ll make a pretty tasty sauce…and your company will have you to thank for their increased productivity.

Thank you for coming to my #FredTalk