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The 7 Secrets to Stop Wasting Thousands on Poorly Run Meetings
by David Finkel
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May 6, 2022
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A well-run meeting can prove invaluable to your organization and help fuel growth and new ideas within your organization. A poorly run meeting, however, can not only weaken company morale but cost you thousands of dollars each and every year in lost wages and productivity.

For example, an hour-long weekly meeting with 10 attendees can cost an average of $20,000 dollars a year.  So, you must ask yourself, is the meeting worth the cost? And if so, how can you maximize your time and create the most value from every meeting?

Here are 7 secrets to stop wasting time on poorly run meetings.

1. Only meet to create value. 

Meetings are for creating value, not playing politics, covering your backside, or simply because “that’s how we’ve always done things.”

If the meeting doesn’t create value, cancel the meeting.  You’ll reap an instant savings from the freed-up staff time, not to mention the opportunity for them to do other more valuable work. 

Meetings are a great place to brainstorm ideas, reach a key decision, gain full buy-in from your staff, or coordinate execution.  Just make sure the area you’re brainstorming on, the decision you’re making, or the project you’re coordinating on creates enough value for your company to make it yield a healthy return on your meeting investment.

2. Plan the meeting in advance. 

Make it a cultural “must-have” to have a leader (or at least facilitator) for every meeting, who has given the meeting thought.  Ideally, this means producing a written agenda which gets in the hands of all participants well in advance of the meeting, so they can come prepared themselves. 

If there is specific information or other preparation work that participants need to have ready, make that explicit on the agenda. 

Again, this isn’t just about creating a “policy” (which in many organizations will simply be ignored) but rather, about making it a cultural must-have in your company that this is how we do meetings – we plan them, we have written agendas, we come fully prepared.

3. Hold your participants accountable to start the meeting strong.

This means starting the meeting on time and expecting all meeting participants to come prepared.  If Tim comes in late or unprepared, privately hold him back after the meeting to have an adult conversation.

“Tim, I noticed that you came in 12 minutes late today and that you didn’t have the Calloway numbers that we needed ready to share.  Did something happen that got in the way of that?  It had an impact on the meeting and your peers.”

All of us will have times when things come up, but if Tim has a repeated pattern of things coming up that is something that you need to lay out as unacceptable.  Frame it in terms of the impact of that behavior on the other participants and the company. Ask for his full agreement to change that behavior.  This kind of immediate and direct communication, respectful and done in private after the meeting, usually will clean up Tim’s behavior. 

4. Follow your meeting plan. 

It’s one thing to have an agenda, but altogether another thing to follow it. 

Make sure whoever is leading the meeting guides the conversation, giving all participants a voice, pushing past unproductive moments when the meeting is on the verge of going down a dead-end spur.  Of course, there are times when that tangent which Sarah brings up is brilliant and sparks a whole new way of seeing the situation and the best course of action. 

Experienced leaders know when to let spontaneity and creativity have a free reign.  There are times when ditching your pre-conceived agenda is the right move for the company.

5. Clarify and follow up on action items. 

It’s one thing to have a productive meeting, but to reap the value of that meeting, stuff must get done.  At the end of the meeting, go back and explicitly clarify action commitments out of the meeting.  It might sound like this:

“Let’s recap what we agreed to do.  Tim, you own two action steps from today, X and Y, both of which are to be done by this Friday close of business.  You agreed to mark them complete on the project board when done.  Sarah, you own item Z, which is due by the 15th, and which you’ll give a summary of the outcome in your next weekly report…”

Clarifying who owns which tasks, by when, and how they’ll “close the loop” by reporting back its completion is half the battle for accountability.  The other half is ongoing follow-up to make sure all assigned tasks got done.  As a default, the meeting leader should be responsible to check in with all the task holders on the status and to hold them accountable if not done as agreed.  Of course, he or she could delegate this follow-up responsibility, but as a default, this works well.

6. Send a meeting “recap” email. 

ThisThis is an email that lists data points, decisions, next steps (Who? What? When? How to close loop?).

7. Be the role model for the behavior you want to see. 

One final comment on execution—as the leader in your company you must model the behavior you want others to emulate. 

Are you clear at the end of meetings as to who owns which next steps and by when?  Do you follow up with them and hold them accountable for their assigned tasks?  Do you consistently execute on your action assignments out of meetings? 

A culture of accountability is built in great part by leaders consistently doing the behaviors they want their teams to absorb.

Once you start implementing these 7 secrets, you will find that your meetings are shorter and more productive which leads to more productivity in other areas of your business as well.

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About the author
David Finkel
A former Olympic level athlete turned serial entrepreneur, David Finkel is the CEO of Maui Mastermind®, one of the world’s premier business coaching companies that has coached thousands of business owners to grow their companies and increase their owner independence.
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