Reframing “We Need Fewer Meetings”

In recent weeks, I have facilitated conversations with two different leadership teams in which people have questioned the need to meet as a team. In one team, the suggestion was to have less frequent meetings or shorten them from 90 minutes to 60. 

In the other team, someone argued that executives shouldn’t be required to attend all meetings. This suggestion came after team members agreed that their lack of coordination and trust was holding back the organization’s effectiveness!

“We have too many meetings” is something I’ve heard often. But it often reminds me of former Ford Motor Company CEO Alan Mulally’s response to an executive who argued that he shouldn’t have to attend the mandatory weekly executive team meeting. Mulally said, “That’s okay, you don’t have to come to the meetings…. I mean, you can’t be part of the Ford team if you don’t—but it’s okay. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person.” 

As CEO, Mulally made executive team meetings both mandatory and more frequent precisely because, whatever they were doing in the meetings, they hadn’t been addressing the most important issues of the enterprise.

For example, in the book American Icon, Mullaly is described as chiding the team for their unjustifiably rosy progress updates. He said, “We’re going to lose billions of dollars this year [...] Is there anything that’s not going well here?”

For me, the “too many meetings” idea tends to be driven by several unproductive behaviors and approaches. 

1. There’s no clear definition of what belongs in the team meeting. So, when people are saying, “There are too many meetings,” they actually mean, “These meetings aren’t a good use of my time.” Designing the meeting so that it focuses on the right topics and engages all of the participants is a helpful approach. (See previous point on hub-and-spoke meetings.) 

2. People don't adequately prepare their part of the discussion. In this case, the meeting seems unproductive because participants don’t know why the topic was nominated for the agenda, what parts of it warrant their attention, or how to respond productively. Here, developing clearer standards of preparation for discussion leaders can make the meetings more productive. 

Writing in Harvard Business Review, Roger Schwarz provides a tactical suggestion — list agenda topics as questions the team needs to answer. He writes: “Most agenda topics are simply several words strung together to form a phrase, for example: ‘office space reallocation.’ This leaves meeting participants wondering, ‘What about office space reallocation?’ When you list a topic as a question (or questions) to be answered, it instead reads like this: ‘Under what conditions, if any, should we reallocate office space?’” 

When there’s a clear question to answer, the benchmark preparation needed for an effective conversation is much clearer. 

3. Some participants don’t actually see themselves as a leader of the team. And because of that, the team meeting feels like a disruption from their “real” jobs running their individual teams. Sometimes a mindset shift in the participant is required. Other times, it requires a mindset shift in the overall team leader so that everyone is invited to the leadership table and enabled to provide meaningful input into the team’s decisions.