How Not to Run Meetings

Imagine a doctor rolling a patient into surgery saying, "If I didn't have to operate on people, I'd like my job a lot more." Or LeBron James telling a reporter, "If it weren't for the games and the practices, I'd really enjoy being an NBA player." Ridiculous, right?

Now imagine an executive saying, "If I didn't have to go to meetings, I'd like my job a lot more." Of course, I've heard this many times from the senior executives I've consulted to in my career. At first glance, it seems understandable, even humorous. But in reality, there is something very wrong about it.

The truth is, meetings should be the most important central activity in the life of the leader in most organizations. Meetings, for instance, are where generals decide whether to go to war, where executives decide how to deal with a changing market, and where mothers and fathers decide what to do about a family crisis.

But most meetings are run terribly. Leaders too often fail to entertain conflict, create relevant agendas, and squash show-and-tell presentations and lengthy department-by-department reporting that puts people to sleep.

The biggest problem with meetings, though, is that they so often mix tactical and strategic topics in the same conversation. A good way to understand this problem is to think about how it plagues us in our homes.

My wife and I often have our "meetings" in the morning when we're getting ready for our day. Our conversation goes something like this: "Who's picking the kids up from school? Do you think we should try to have another baby? What are we going to do about dinner tonight? Where should be go on vacation this year?" We leave having no idea what we accomplished, wondering if we were just brainstorming, making decisions or thinking out loud.

The same thing happens during so many of the executive staff meetings I've observed. Leaders shift the topic of conversation from extremely tactical issues like closing a sale, to a long-term topic like how to position the company for new competition, to more intermediate topics like how much to invest in research and development over the next eighteen months.

The thing is, even the most intelligent human beings cannot make the contextual shifts that are necessary to have all of these conversations in the same setting. And they certainly can't do so in a way that ensures that everyone in the room is on the same page. Some members of a team, either because of functional responsibility or personality, will take a conservative, protective view of an issue, while others will be more creative or daring. The meeting will drift back and forth until time has run out and everyone leaves frustrated that the most important topics weren't discussed and that no clear decisions have been made.

What leaders really need are different kinds of meetings – shorter ones, perhaps, but separate nonetheless – for tactical and strategic conversations. Clarifying the context of our meetings and keeping those different types of conversations in their proper places will give our meetings greater clarity and focus, which will go a long way toward eliminating the frustration and confusion that we've unnecessarily come to expect.

In fact, one client I worked with credits the change in their meetings to the turnaround of their organization. Back in 2006, a healthcare company was having trouble gaining momentum in the industry. They started to use their Monday morning staff meetings as a "Tactical Meeting," focused entirely on tactics to execute their goals. When they were tempted to get off topic and wrestle a big strategic issue, they scheduled a "Strategic Meeting" for a later time.

If the strategic issue was critical, they would have the strategic meeting immediately after the tactical meeting. That way the entire team was already together to work through the issue right away. The key to their success was being disciplined enough to focus on one strategic issue at a time, rather than mixing it with a variety of other topics.