Sarah Kellogg Neff is CEO of The Lactation Network, a national provider of insurance-covered lactation care.
A lot of meetings, as they currently stand, are worthy of our disdain. They can be meandering, hierarchical and ego-filled. Little more than roll-call followed by circuitous posturing.
Most of us contend with workplace meetings. Somehow, despite their prevalence, the rules of engagement in those meetings have largely been left unchallenged.
If you hate meetings, I get it. I’ve been there. Before I became the CEO of The Lactation Network, I spent two decades in and out of government agencies, law firms, startups and marketing boutiques. I felt the rare highs of super creative meetings with all synapses firing, and the all too common lows of terrible meetings where my voice, my time and my presence didn’t matter.
There are better ways to meet.
But first, we must eliminate the stigmas around why and how we meet the way we do.
Meeting Misunderstandings
1. Important people get invited to meetings.
Nope: Important work usually happens outside of meetings. In fact, sometimes the most “important” person isn’t in the meeting at all.
Herein lies a familiar trap—societal and cultural norms related to status and importance. How and when meetings are requested, accepted or run (and by whom) trigger a forceful undercurrent related to our worth and value. Yet as CEO of TLN, I encourage people all over our org chart to think critically about whether they need to attend meetings—even if it’s me requesting their time.
Further, my COO and I are rarely in the same physical or virtual room. When she isn’t included on an invitee list, she doesn’t assume she or her skills aren’t wanted. On the contrary, she knows her talents are needed elsewhere as we divide and conquer together.
Meetings become fraught with the subtext of ego when psychological safety is low, and people believe their Zoom square (and the amount of time they can command attention) is directly proportionate to their worth at work. Don’t be the company that perpetuates that sentiment among your employees.
2. Good meetings require detailed agendas.
They don’t, actually. Mindsets are more important than agendas.
Meetings are just a tool. They’re fundamentally flexible, and how we use them matters. We make meetings work for us, not against us, by establishing healthy mindsets around them. Do this by ensuring colleagues have the autonomy to check in regularly about recurring meetings to assess if those meetings are still serving all attendees. Further, establish meeting types to establish meeting purpose. Are you gathering to brainstorm? Have 1:1 touchpoints? Provide project status updates?
Hold fast to meeting purpose over meeting agendas. No amount of agenda items makes up for a meeting that lacks mindset.
3. Meetings can be “hacked.”
Unfortunately, there is no tip or trick that will transform how your team meets. The lift isn’t light, but the payoff is worth it.
In its simplest form, culture is what it feels like to be part of an organization. That’s going to feel a little different for each person in your org, and that’s okay. However, there are some fundamental questions everyone on your team should answer similarly: Do you feel a sense of accomplishment after a day’s work? When you’re signing off on Friday, do you have permission to rest? How do you feel as Monday morning approaches?
Meetings are fascinating in that they’re both a symptom and a cure. If your meetings feel terrible, it means something about your company culture needs attention. By getting curious about what’s off, and investigating each aspect of how you attract, retain (and lose) talent, you’ll discover that shifting how you meet is one way to help cure a languishing company culture.
That said, better meetings aren’t the whole cure, and I’m afraid there’s no shortcut through this work. One-offs like adopting the Speedy Meetings setting, launching No Meeting Wednesdays or banishing 18-point meeting agendas won’t get you anywhere if you’re not crystal clear on how you want your colleagues to view themselves and each other.
Once you clarify what it means to be on your team and pull that clarity through every aspect of your team’s experience (including how you meet), you’ll find that your meetings—and your days—suck a whole lot less. You might even start having fun.
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