Making Meetings Work

Welcome to messy but essential, the weekly podcast about the people side of project leadership. It's where we help you improve your soft skills to reduce hard costs. In today's episode, I'm going to be taking a look at the topic of meetings. And I hope that by the time we're done, you won't look at meetings the same way ever again. 

Before we get too far, though, let's kick off with a brief safety share. When we think about safety and projects, the most common thought is around physical safety. And that's important. incident reports and lost time injuries are always about physical mishaps or physical injuries. But what about the emotional safety of teams? so emotional safety is when we can speak up honestly, and candidly at a meeting without being shot down by the leader, or one of our teammates. When we can say, "I see how you might think that that's an interesting perspective." "Let's explore it a bit further." Instead of "what a stupid idea, where did that come from?" It's not about not challenging each other. That has to happen. It's about not judging or condemning each other, for raising ideas or points that we didn't think of. We all have a responsibility to create an emotionally safe environment. We can explore this in greater depth in a future podcast. 

So now let's get back to the topic at hand: leading great meetings. As you're listening to this, I'd like you to think about or reflect upon a recent meeting you attended. Or perhaps, one you lead. Keep that meeting in mind as we work through this podcast, so that you'll have a consistent example to work from. I'm going to be looking at meetings from quite a different perspective, and having a specific meeting experience in mind helps us to make the leap from the artifficial world of a podcast, to the real world of meetings. And then we're going to look at meetings through for simple one word questions. Why? What, who, and how? 

Bill Russell, the legendary Boston Celtics basketball player, says that the magic to a great meeting is all of the work that gets done beforehand. It's the preparation that sets the stage for a productive meeting. Sure, sometimes we have to wing it, probably more often than we realize. But without preparation, we can waste everyone's time and create a lack of trust. So let's start that preparation stage with a simple question. 

Why? Simon Sinek explores the importance of starting with why and his book start with why. It's a great read, so please check out the show notes for a link to the book and more information on it. It's hard to find what we should really be discussing at a meeting. For example, if we don't understand why we're having a meeting, we might in fact be surprised at how often we meet without ever asking why. If you've ever sat through a meeting, and partway through the meeting said, "Why am I here?" I would challenge you to have asked that question before you ever got to the meeting, before you put aside other things and missed other priorities because you had to get to this meeting. Why am I here? motivation is really linked to why what gets us excited about things comes from that light part of our brain where we ask the question "why?" Now we might not actually articulate it. We might not say, Why am I here? Okay, some of us that's not really our favorite question. But our brain is going through that process. And as adults, especially so you know, kids show up because they're told to show up, right? But as we become adults, we actually need to create a link between why we're here and what we're going to get out of this. And if you've ever sat in a meeting and found yourself saying "what a waste of time this is," it's because that meeting didn't meet you why. And so your motivation, you know, you're sitting there, you're doodling and you're doing all those things. And ultimately, at the end of the day, your why was never answered. Now, I'm not suggesting that through this podcast that you should rebel and that we, you know, I'm not inciting people to riot here. What I am suggesting, though, is that every time we look at our calendar and say, Hmm, I got a meeting today. Two o'clock or whatever, we ask ourselves the question, why am I going to that meeting? Why am I important at that meeting? And here's the reason for that. If you ask yourself, why are you important at that meeting? And there's no good answer, then you need to find a way to get out of the meeting. On the other hand, if you ask yourself, why am I important to that meeting, and you can think of what you could bring value to that meeting, then you can start to prepare and get your head into the space you need to be to truly make that meeting, not only beneficial to you, but beneficial to the whole business. So it does start with our why. 

It's not an automatic question. If you're a highly technical person, there might be a good chance that that's a question you never really asked yourself, because, of course, I'm here because there's got to be a good reason, Bob called the meeting. Fair enough. But I'm going to push you a little bit to ask why more often. So let's step back a little bit and ask ourselves, if the why for the meeting is clear. Have we considered from our perspective as an individual what you're going to contribute to it?

Now, you know why you're there. Okay. It's because we have to hear about money and budget, or it's because we have to look at a new timeline in order to deliver the project on time, or it's because we have to get new instructions from the sponsor, whatever that might be. That's a good, why from the corporate perspective, and then if we've asked ourselves, why I'm there, why me? Could somebody else be who in my stead, for instance, is there actually somebody who is more appropriate to be at this meeting. And one of the things I learned a long time ago in dealing with small businesses that became much bigger businesses was that that core group of people who used to always get together and meet as the business grew, and there was no necessity for them to be at every meeting, they started to feel left out, because "I used to be at every meeting. Right? Now I'm not." And they felt less important. And what we needed to work with and help them understand. And the same goes for a project, you know, as the project moves from that stage of the pre feasibility through to construction and all of the steps along the way. Pre feasibility, you're involved, you're analytical, you figuring out whether or not this is the right project. But you know, you might not be the right person to be at the table when we start talking about choosing suppliers for pumps, or construction, or whatever. So that's where we come back to the why, why am I here? Why me? Or why not me? 

Now, let's move on a little bit and look at the second question. So if we really understand why we're here, what are we trying to accomplish at the meeting? I don't know about you, but I've sat through hundreds of meetings in my life, many of whom I was paid to sit through and observe. And that was kind of cool. And if I was bored, I was sure others were. And my job then was to give feedback to the team at the end to say, "so how is the meeting?" And I felt myself saying, Wow, I hope they're going to use me again, because I've got to give them some bad news, this meeting sucked. So what are we here for this? The analytical part of our brain? This is the part of our brain that says, What information do we need at the meeting? What are we going to be talking about? What resources should we be deploying? It's all of the data side, if you wish of the meeting. Now, why is that so important to us? Well, at the end of the day, if the why of the meeting is for us to be able to make a decision. 

By the way, let me just interrupt my own thoughts here. If the why of the meeting is simply to give me information, send me a PowerPoint, send me an email, you know what, I don't need to come and sit in a room to hear it. If you want my input on that information, if you want to talk about how we're going to make this information alive, then I'm happy to be in the room. But if you just want to inform me, I got to tell you, there are way better ways and better tools out there today to inform me than inviting me to a meeting. Because every hour I sit in a meeting is an hour I'm not doing my other parts of my job. So we've solved the why now I'm looking at the what. And part of the what, like it or not comes up to comes down to how much is this costing us for us to be sitting around? So one of the things that always surprised me and I worked for a bank for many, many years. And you know, if you wanted to spend more than $300 you had to have approval and purchase orders and all those things. And I bet it's the same in you know in your project, for instance. There's a cap, but you can bring 10 people together for half a day that might cost the business $15,000. But you didn't have to get permission for that. So you went through hoops hoops for 300 bucks. But you didn't have to go through hoops to spend $15,000 and potentially frustrate people, create challenges and so on. So the what of the meeting, that analytical side, we need to be able to ask ourselves really quickly, what is it we're trying to accomplish? What is it that we need at the meeting in order to accomplish it? data stats, reviews, documents, whatever? And what are the outcomes that we would like to see at the end of this meeting? Are you clear on those? 

So now we've asked why we're here, what we're looking at, the next thing I want to think about his who should be at the meeting. So from a personal perspective, at the beginning of the podcast, I talked about why you're there. But let's look at everybody else around the table. Who were the right people at the right time for the right topic to be in that room?

I sit through lots of meetings for clients. And one of the things I've always said is, if you sit through a two hour meeting, and you don't say a single word, you probably shouldn't have been there. Read the minutes, look at the action statements, whatever. If you're not an active contributor to that meeting, if you're not part of the who should be there, but you're just taking up space around the table, you have to ask yourself, Am I contributing to the value of this project? Am I really making the difference that I want to get up every morning at five o'clock in the morning to make? So my challenge to each and every one of us is when you ,especially if you're leading the meeting, every meeting, ask yourself, do I have the right people here? 

Now, I'm recording this at a time when we are living through a pandemic. And as a result, we have transitioned from meeting in person to virtual meetings. One of the exciting things with that is that in a virtual meeting, you can invite people and de-invite people as you need to. Used to be you had to get, you know, arrange conference room, find where fit in everybody's schedules, people had to come from all over the place, you know, maybe you if you were doing a an on site project that had to come from different parts of the plant, or different parts of the mine, or different parts of wherever, in order to attend your meeting. Well, as we do more and more virtual meetings, the who has actually become easier. We can have people who are just there for the 15 minutes, we need them to resource and then they're gone. Understanding the who is as important as the why and the watch. Now, I want you to keep in mind, however, that understanding the who doesn't make it easy to decide who should be there. Because sometimes there are people who are going to be there because they've always been at these meetings, and now you've gotta manage, their have fragile ego, when you say, "Hey, I look to the list, and you know what, you're not actually bringing any value." That's a tough conversation. So be gentle as you move into the who. 

But if we truly want to be efficient in projects, if we truly want to cut those hard costs, we need to make some of the hard decisions that require soft skills, require building enough trust with people to be able to sit down and say, "Bob, Sue, Tom, whomever, I've looked over the agenda, and I don't think that we're going to need you at today's meeting, because there's nothing on the agenda that you're going to do that you need to provide insight for. But I'd like you to kind of keep available in the event that something should come up, I can give you a send you a text, and you can join the meeting pretty quickly because it's just a virtual meeting." Fair enough. That might be a way to gradually move Tom issue or whomever out of that regular meeting space. 

So as we continue to look at meetings differently, I want to now look at how do you have this meeting? Okay, so it's virtual Of course, that's how we're going to have it. Really? Are we just going to all sit on one screen? What did somebody call it the other day? Hollywood Squares. A some of you may never remember that show. I don't think I ever actually watched it. But it was kind of an early zoom or teams or or WebEx meeting or whatever where it was you had all of these little people in little boxes on the screen and they were, you know, as part of a game show or something, I guess and they were little little stamp sized faces on the screen very much like what we see. We have 20 people on a team's zoom call. Well, if you're looking at the how, and it's great to be using Virtual Media, excellent stuff. But are you just all sitting there like bumps on a log? You know, you can? Are you asking people to make sure that their cameras on so that they're physically present? 

I grew up in an era where conference calls were when you got the dishes done, you know, you could just kind of have your headphones in, and you would be participating in the conference call, but you were doing something else? Well, we discovered in the last episode, you can't actually do that. I know, we all think we can. But the reality is you missing key stuff. So I insist, for instance, that if we're having a visual type of zoom type call, that your camera has to be on. Oh, and I've heard all the excuses, oh, it's early in the morning, all my kids are in the background, whatever, I want to see you. Otherwise, let's just have a conference call on the phone. But if we're going to go through the effort of having a virtual call, that has a visual possibility, I want to make sure everybody's visible. Now,you're gonna get pushed back. 

People are going to say, it's not convenient. And like it or not, we're chained to our desk, you know, the old days of that conference call when you wandered around with your telephone. And you could be anywhere in the house or anywhere in the office or out on the street? Well, if now you've got to actually have the visual component, it's not as easy to do that. So there's our incentive for keeping those meetings shorter. Because people don't want to be chained to their desk or to the computer that long. So the How is just as important as the why the what are the Who. How we have this meeting? Do we insist that people turn the video on? Do we use some of the tools that can go with the virtual meeting world that we live in? Do we have breakout rooms where we talk about something in a large group, then we break into small groups for a couple of minutes, 10 15 minutes, then we come back? That's part of the How are you giving thought to this. So I started by talking about the fact that the preparation is what really makes a great meeting. Well, if you are going to get into breakout rooms and using different tools, then you have to give those give thought to how to do that before you ever have the meeting. 

A long time ago, I was at a conference and the conference speaker talked about growing bamboo. And he talked about the fact that when you grow bamboo, you plant this little seed and it's it's in very moist, parts of the world, Thailand, Hawaii, etc, obviously. And you plant this little seed and you put on good fresh Earth and dark earth. And then you pull out the weeds as they grow and you water it and for years, nothing grows above the surface of the earth. But on the fifth year, that bamboo starts to grow, and it can grow up to two feet a week, two feet a week. That plant is going to grow up to 70 feet tall. And in 200 mile an hour or 360 kilometer an hour, whatever it might be monsoon winds, the entire forest lies on its side: doesn't get uprooted because it spent four years building the base in order to have that rapid growth. 

And I think the same goes for our project meetings. If you spend time getting ready for the meeting, being clear on why you're having a meeting, understanding what resources etc would be the absolute best to make sure that this meeting has everything it needs to succeed. determining who absolutely the right people are to be around the table, and who the wrong people are that aren't in the meeting. And you've looked at how to make it successful. You're already way ahead of the vast majority of meetings. That's all the prep. So that the hour you spend in a meeting, or however long it may be, is highly successful. Because you've asked those four key questions. Why are we here? What do we need to accomplish? What do we need in order to accomplish it? Who are the right people? And how are we going to execute this meeting in order to be the most successful possible? 

I hope moving forward that you can ask yourself these questions for the next meeting, you're going to lead. And if you weren't leading the meeting, but you're a participant, if you can't answer those four questions, maybe you want to sit down and have a conversation with whoever is leading the meeting. Or send them over to listen to this podcast and give them some insights that maybe they didn't have before. Next week, we're going to have a look at something a little different as we delve into how you think and why you think the way you do and we're going to build a little bit on these four questions when we do that. Thanks for listening. Have great meetings. And remember, you're important enough to choose which meetings you attend.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai