Why Do People Put up With Bad Meetings?

from Able Leader, April 2002

by Steve Kaye

Most companies hold more meetings during a recession.

This occurs because during bad times management is trying to figure out how to cope with reduced income.

Sadly, these meetings are often poorly run and thus work counter to finding desperately needed solutions.

So, you may wonder, “Why would anyone hold a bad meeting?” After all, it seems so simple to prepare an agenda and then follow it.

Here are some explanations with solutions.

1) Lack of Knowledge.

Most people have never been in an effectively run meeting. If they knew what to do, they would do it.

Solution: Send them to a workshop on Effective Meetings. Here they will learn how to organize and conduct meetings that end with results. They will learn how to prepare an agenda that works. They will even learn how to deal with unproductive participants. And good news: this is one solution that quickly pays for itself. If you were to hold one or two effective meetings after such a workshop, the money saved on those meetings would pay for the workshop.

Okay, I realize this sounds like a commercial, but most people really do not know how to conduct an effective meeting. My workshop shows them how. Call me if you know a company that could benefit from this.

2) False Efficiency.

Some people are too busy to prepare for a meeting. So, they just show up, hoping that the group they invited will miraculously find something useful. Unfortunately, the organizer often has no idea what this "something" might be and thus is unable to offer any clues on how to find it.

Solution: Tell your staff that meetings are an expensive business activity. Small amounts of planning save huge amounts of time for everyone. For example, if the person calling the meeting were to spend a half hour planning an agenda, the result could be a meeting that lasted an hour instead of four. Ideally, a meeting should earn a positive return on the investment in conducting the meeting. That means the value of the result will exceed the cost of obtaining it.

3) Fear of commitment.

Effective meetings end with results, such as decisions, agreements, and solutions. All of these lead to commitments to honor the decisions or commitments to implement the solutions. That means people must take action, meet deadlines, or do something. Some people find this really frightening, because commitment implies responsibility.

Solution: Revise the reward system in your business so that people are rewarded for doing things instead of talking about doing them.

Note that sometimes meetings fail to produce workable results. In these cases, people will prefer to end up with no results instead of bad results. They may need to learn how to obtain results that everyone will support. As you might expect, my workshop on Effective Meetings shows people how to do that.

4) Lazy.

Most meetings are run like a party, where people entertain themselves by talking. This is certainly a lot easier than working on real tasks, such as making plans, completing projects, or coaching one’s staff.

Solution: Inform the people who hide from work by attending meetings that they must spend at least a couple of hours each day working. If they resist, then replace them with tape recorders. Put the tape recorders in a conference room where they play the same statements that these people make in meetings, such as:

“Well, what do you want to talk about?”

“I don’t know. What do you want to talk about?”

“It can’t be done.”

“If we high bandwidth an aggressive megabyte technology with a proactive marketing paradigm we can helicopter this puppy into profitable global dominance.”

“Last week while I was playing golf I realized how valuable my department is to this company and my partner, who just bought a new car that has an eight speaker sound system made by the same company that makes the projector on this table, which you all know is very reliable, just like my staff, was talking about the problem (hey, you can stop reading this nonsense here and skip to the next paragraph) with this business, which we need to fix because it just eats our lunch on profits in the other regions where I know someone’s not pulling their weight but we’re working hard in my department to make up for it and then this bird flew by and that reminded me of the time when I was talking to the CEO about how important my department is to this company, and the CEO said it’s a shame no one else takes this business as seriously as I do, but that’s what happens when you play golf on a Wednesday morning before the crowd shows up. By the way, what was your question?”

Of course, you can record customized statements to match your business. And it’s okay if no one hears what the machines say, because no one pays attention to this babble in a meeting, anyhow.

Key Point: Meetings are a business activity that should help (not hinder) your business.

Much success,

Steve Kaye
714-528-1300