“But I already spend so much of my work life in meetings, I don’t have time for more of them”. These are the words most commonly uttered by leaders who consider having four different meetings on a regular basis for the first time.
After considering the suggested essential meetings you may feel overwhelmed. Take a moment to respond to the question below and then read the article in the following activity.
Let us start by applying the model in the most time-intensive way possible to determine how much time it actually takes to hold these meetings.
- 15 minutes each day in daily check-in meetings
- 2 hours each week in weekly staff meetings
- 6 hours each month in monthly/ad hoc topical meetings
- 2 days each quarter in quarterly review meetings
- Grand total of 1,490 minutes, or 25 hours per month.
- Assuming a 45-hour workweek, that amounts to about 13% of our time.
That means even when we’re spending the maximum amount of time at each meeting, something few teams need to do, more than 85% of our time is still available for whatever else we do. Even if a person were on as many as three teams and if all three of those teams spent the maximum amount of time in their meetings (something that is highly unlikely), that would still amount to less than half their time.
When we factor in the amount of time they’ll avoid wasting because they are actually focused on the right issues during their meetings and eliminating all the interruptions that happen because they’re out of sync with one another, the value they get from having more meetings, not less, increases.
It is worth asking, what else should leaders be doing besides going to meetings? One of a leader’s primary priorities is to create an environment where those around them can flourish and be productive and that cannot happen if they are not having regular effective meetings.
But what about management? Don’t leaders need to allocate a lot of their time to managing their people? While it’s true that the single most important activity that a leader must do (outside of being a good team member) is managing his or her direct reports, much of that actually happens during meetings. Sure, they need to do some one-on-one mentoring, but that isn’t usually what executives are hoping to do when they’re arguing about having to spend too much time in meetings.
The truth is, if leaders are having the right kind of meetings, if they’re driving issues to closure and holding one another accountable, then there is much less to do outside meetings, including managing their direct reports.
The thesis behind all of this is worth repeating:
That’s why it’s really hard for leaders to make a credible case for spending less time in meetings, assuming those meetings are good ones.