Death by Meeting

You've all heard it.  In fact, you've probably all said it.  "That meeting was a waste of time!"  Or, "That's an hour out of my life that I will never get back."  I know I've said both in the past.  We hear a lot about so-called "meeting hygeine", but the actual execution often falls short.  And in the end, we find ourselves sitting in meetings that seem to never end and worse yet, don't seem to have a point.

A few years ago, Patrick Lencioni, an author who has written extensively on leadership and management, wrote a book called Death by Meeting, which tells the story of a busy corporate executive (all of his books have a similar theme, called a "leadership fable" in which he tells a fictional story to describe and teach important management lessons) who finds he is wasting way too much time in all-day meetings.  Full disclosure, I have not read the book.  However, I think the concepts that he discusses are appropriate.

Now, I am going to tell my own "leadership fable."  Imagine you are a busy health care executive.  Your hospital is focusing on a set of quality metrics that support your strategic plan, which of course is consistent with your mission, vision, and core values.  You have scheduled a meeting to review these metrics with the rest of your team, as you will need to be presenting these metrics to the Board next week. 

Sound familiar?  I bet that you have either been involved in a similar kind of meeting in the past, either as the busy health care executive who needs to review the quality metrics or even the team member who needs to report the metrics to your immediate supervisor.  It all sounds very reasonable, right?  And if your hospital is like just about every other hospital around the country, there are regularly scheduled meetings just like this that occur, depending on the metric, weekly, monthly, or quarterly. 

Here's a good question though.  How much time goes into the preparations for a meeting like this?  Well, a few years ago, Michael Mankins wrote a blog post for the Harvard Business Review in which he analyzed how many hours were spent every year on a weekly meeting just like the one I described.  I was talking about it to a colleague a week or so ago and tried to find it.  Luckily, another blogger I follow named Michael Roberto (if you don't follow him, you should!) wrote about Mankins post earlier this week.

So, how many hours do you think were spent every year on the weekly meeting in Mankin's analysis?  Well, the busy executive spent 7,000 hours per year meeting with direct reports and preparing for the weekly meeting (that seems like a lot, but if each health care executive has to report on different metrics, you can understand how roughly 135 hours are spent preparing for one weekly meeting).  Now, consider the fact that each of the executive's direct reports have to meet with each one of his or her direct reports to prepare for that same meeting.  And so on.  And so on.  It all cascades down to the front-line leaders and managers.  Now how many hours were spent?

Would you believe 300,000 hours per year?!?!?  On one weekly meeting that is probably, at best, a report out and nothing more?  It seems almost inconceivable.  But then when you look at the cartoon graphic on the blog and really focus on what Mankin is saying, it seems fairly accurate.  Now THAT is what I call "Death by meeting!"

Think of how much money gets wasted - by just one hospital - every year to prepare for that one weekly meeting.  Mankin goes on to write, "Research shows that 15% of an organization's collective time is spent in meetings.."  Unfortunately, that percentage has increased every year since 2008. 

How can we stop wasting precious time and money on meetings?  Professor Roberto recommends asking five key questions BEFORE scheduling any kind of meeting:

1.  What is the purpose of the meeting?  What are we trying to achieve? 

2.  Who should attend this meeting?  Who does NOT need to be there?

3.  How should we structure the meeting?  How will that structure help us achieve the outcomes we desire?

4.  What pre-work should participants do, and what materials should we distribute in advance, so that we use our meeting time efficiently? 

5.  How do I plan to follow up so as to insure that we do what we say we are going to do after the meeting?  What will I do if we don't achieve the results we expect as a result of decisions taken during the meeting?

These five important questions are an important and fundamental aspect for good meeting hygiene.  Perhaps if we used these questions more, we would waste less time, energy, and money and avoid "Death by meetings."