Leadership in a world gone mad: An ode to fewer, better meetings

How could you become a better, more efficient and collaborative leader? Anne Morriss and Frances Frei provide a persuasive and time-saving strategy in the first in a series looking at the practice of leadership in a mad, mad world.

One way that organisations have responded to the combination of unprecedented uncertainty and a more distributed workforce is to drag more people into more meetings during more hours of the workday. Researchers now estimate that workers are spending about a third of their time in meetings, and much of that time is unproductive. One study from meeting software company Doodle estimated that across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, 24 billion hours will be lost to pointless meetings in the next year. 

All this time together is creating the illusion of progress while inhibiting the kind of deep work, true collaboration, and creativity needed to solve our increasingly complex problems. In response, some leaders have simply banned this toxic substance (no-meeting Fridays!), but a more effective remedy is to create a gathering culture defined by fewer, better meetings. Treat your people’s time as the most strategic resource you have. If you’re going to use it, use it wisely. 

One company we recently worked with leaned into this philosophy, reducing its employees’ time in meetings by fifty percent in just a few months. Early indicators of outcomes from this shift include reduced burnout and stronger customer relationships without any reduction in team connectivity. Tactics that worked well for this organisation: embracing old-school meeting agendas, using AI for notetaking, and sharing audio recordings with people who weren’t in the meeting, who could then listen to the proceedings on their own time (often at 2x speed).  

On our podcast Fixable we interviewed Claire Hughes Johnson about how to run a great meeting. As the former COO of Stripe, Claire helped grow the company from fewer than 200 employees to more than six thousand – and from millions in revenue to billions. A casual talk she once gave on how to run an effective staff meeting at Google, her former employer, immediately went viral. (Claire is now a corporate officer and adviser to Stripe, in addition to writing great books). 

Claire’s principal advice is to prepare. Before you have the audacity to convene people, make sure you have clear answers to these questions: 

• Why are we meeting? What are our objectives? 

• Who needs to be there to achieve these objectives? 

• How are we going to spend our time together? 

Circulate materials in advance so that everyone has the runway to contribute effectively, which some people need more than others. “Extroverts talk to think,” Claire explained. “Introverts think to talk.” And, yes, she’s on board with agendas, which signal where you’re going and keep everyone on track. 

Once the meeting begins, the objective is to surface unique information and ideas from your fellow gatherers. Our favourite prompt is, “Can someone articulate a different point of view?” which is a lower-stakes variant of “Who has a different point of view?” This will also help you resist the temptation to converge too quickly on a less-than-optimal solution. In our experience, fast convergence typically leads to a false optima (also known as not our best idea) and a higher chance that people will hold back additional ideas, even when they’re better. 

Finally, stick the landing. Before your meeting ends, summarise key decisions and action items. Make sure everyone knows what they’re responsible for delivering and the deadlines they need to hit. Claire likes to use a “check-out” at the close of meetings – a rapid-fire prompt to help reinforce commitments and get a pulse check on the group’s experience. A standard check-out she relies on is: “Use one or two words to describe what you’re thinking as we close this meeting – it could be a feeling, an idea, a topic you want more of.” 

When it comes to meetings, we urge you to get into the organisational sandbox and play with new approaches. Are you meeting to ideate or execute? To learn from what happened or prepare for what’s coming? Adapt your meeting’s structure, style, and pace to your goals. The only truly universal meeting rule is that if you’re gathering in person for any significant amount of time, then you need to feed people. 

Make the experience of work feel a little less crazy by committing to fewer, better meetings. We’ve seen companies go from sixty-minute meetings to thirty-minute meetings, thirty-minute meetings to twenty-minute meetings, using our favourite intervention profile: no new people, no new technology, just a healthy dose of intention.