“Senior leaders are ready to work on meetings when they’re ready to work on them. And there is not a lot you can do about it, and I would not wish anybody the thankless task of trying to get them excited about or interested in that project.”
Rebecca Hinds, PhD, Dr. Goucher, and I hosted a live conversation last week to answer common questions about the Quest for Better Meetings (recording below).
The tippity-top question is always, “How can I get other people to care?” Because:
You need your team to care so they can help make your meetings better.
You need other teams to care to make your cross-functional meetings better.
You need leadership to care so they can authorize the time and budget it takes to get your meetings in order.
You need the C-suite to care so they can provide the support needed to maintain a better meeting standard going forward.
Tricky stuff, because improving meetings isn’t typically at the top of anyone’s list.
Until it is.
I’ve worked with hundreds of teams and led dozens of organization-wide meeting transformation projects. Which means that at some point, someone with budget and authority cared. They decided those projects were a go.
As our event was ending, Alex Pukinskis asked:
“Earlier on, someone said that executives won’t be ready to work on this until they’re ready. What have you seen happen just before an executive is ready? (Any inciting incidents or common triggers for this)?”
We ran out of time to answer then, so I’m sharing my answer below.
To be clear, this isn’t a list of moments when meeting redesign would be useful. It’s a list of moments when people explicitly decide to buy or launch a meeting-focused project, based on my experience.
Have you seen different triggers? Please add your experiences in the comments.
Five Ways Meetings Get the Green Light
#1 — The sales team can’t close deals.
The sales leader observes a few reps’ meetings, sees that they’re lousy, and jumps on it. There are several companies that stay happily busy selling better-meeting services to sales teams.
#2 — The unwatched pot boils over.
The organization has a long history of ineffective meetings that they’ve ignored until:
Time wasted in unproductive meetings is the #1 complaint in three or more consecutive employee engagement surveys. In other words, people have to be consistently, loudly upset for more than a year before an exec finally says, “Fine. L&D, HR… go fix that.” The default project here is training. Side note: I’ve never seen time-wasted calculators, communication analytics, or other attempts to sway leaders with overwhelming data work. Overwhelming complaints, though? Those can become annoying enough to act on.
Someone points out that a series of organizational losses — clients, deals, or key employees — involve stories about terrible meetings, and those bad meetings can’t be pinned on any one convenient scapegoat.
The CEO hits their limit. They’re frustrated by weeks where they feel like they’re running in place in the conference room while their competitors race ahead. They can no longer stand the constant momentum-sucking sound made by the organization’s calendars.
Their initial reaction will often be a calendar purge or a ban on meetings on certain days/times.
They may or may not attempt to improve the quality of the meetings that remain.
#3 — A leader shows up who knows better.
Someone new is in charge.
They worked at an organization that met well and expect the same from their current organization. They’ll start the project themselves and may bring in outside help to work with their teams.
Their business consultant or leadership coach points out how broken meetings are impeding their progress. In this case, the person who knows better — the coach or consultant — often also happens to offer better-meeting training. So efficient!
“Sometimes, there will be ONE exec team member who absolutely gets it. There'll be somebody on the LT for whom it is painfully obvious how bad it is and completely mind-blowing that the others let it persist. They will keep talking about it until one of the other factors hits and the CEO has their lightbulb moment (or until they get frustrated and leave!).
#4 — A leader has a lightbulb moment.
It’s hard to call this a trigger, because the “Oh, hey! Aha!” might come months or years before they’re ready to invest in a project. While most better-meetings marketing is designed to create this moment, I’ve seen it happen most reliably when:
The leader hears other leaders boasting about their meetings. Take the spread of Jeff Bezos’s “two-pizza rule” as an example. People want Bezos’s success, so they adopt his meeting practices.
The leader personally experiences better meeting techniques at a conference or workshop and can easily envision using them in their own meetings. Think low-tech, no sticky notes, easy-peasy, and obviously useful.
The CEO or decision maker might go to a conference, read a book, listen to a talk, binge someone’s content on LI - basically, they get inspired. Now it's their idea, and they’re running with it.
It’s now a pet project, and it will go through no matter what. This is particularly true when leaders latch onto a method, tool, or philosophy as part of the leader they want to be (“I’m the kind of CEO who…”).
It becomes an identity thing.
#5 — A leader is constantly improving all the things, and it’s finally meetings’ turn.
I’ve seen this most on the delivery side of organizations: service teams, product teams, engineering, program management, etc. They’re often seeking ways to improve results through workflow optimization. Some examples:
They implemented an off-the-shelf Agile methodology. Things are better, except now they’re meeting too much. Cue the meeting project.
They’re moving from annual to quarterly planning, so they need to overhaul their planning meetings.
They’re tracking metrics in new ways, which requires new meetings for updating, troubleshooting, and reviewing those metrics.
They’re pursuing certification and need to document key processes, including key meetings, and realize their existing meetings really aren’t something they want to put in front of the auditors.
The false flag:
A leader needs to fill a speaking or workshop slot.
Leaders in communications, events, people & culture, L&D, HR, and other employee-support roles often bring in outside speakers and facilitators. They may engage a meeting expert when employees request a session on meetings, or when someone asks for a particular expert by name.
If you squint a bit, this can look like interest in changing meeting culture. But while many meeting-culture transformations include a talk, an organization scheduling a talk isn’t necessarily eager to transform.
In our conversation, we shared ideas for influencing up, down, and all around. Catch the replay below. Also, see tips in this article about ways to avoid dooming your meeting project.
In the meantime, let us know: What happened just before your group was ready to work on meetings?