“A meeting is an event where minutes are taken and hours are wasted.”   …Milton Berle

Somewhere, there is an unwritten rule that says all managers are required to conduct limitless meetings. It’s in the Manager Handbook or something. You get promoted to management, you are required by law to conduct lots and lots of meetings. Maybe there’s a quota – like a Merit Badge or something.

The challenge is that no one teaches people how to conduct effective meetings. Yes, you know it’s true – you sit in these train wrecks on a regular basis. You are either the victim or the culprit (or both), but you are spending way too much time in meetings. If, however, on the wildly off-chance you don’t have to participate in a lot of bad meetings, you will never know the pain…

Don’t get me wrong – some meetings are necessary. Occasionally, one is actually productive! Most meetings, however, are only marginally beneficial, and many are a complete waste of time. They start late. They are poorly led. They are long on ideas and short on execution. There is no follow-up or accountability. Good ideas are labeled “risky” while bad ideas are pondered for hours on end. Then everyone retreats back to their offices and races to catch up on their work before the next meeting is called. And the cycle starts all over again.

The Scourge That is PowerPoint

And, of course, there is the ubiquitous PowerPoint presentation. There should be an addendum to the aforementioned handbook that provides for excessive punishment for anyone that misuses PowerPoint presentation software. This one product might be the single most abused business tool ever introduced into the workplace. (OK, I’ll grant you that text messaging and Blackberrys would get a lot of votes.)

SunGard, one of the world’s leading software and IT services companies, works with just about every financial services company in the world. In a recent New York Times interview, Cristóbal Conde, President & CEO of SunGard, commented on the use of PowerPoint in the workplace:

I actively despise how people use PowerPoint as a crutch. I think PowerPoint can be a way to cover up sloppy thinking, which makes it hard to differentiate between good ideas and bad ideas. I would much rather have somebody write something longhand, send it in ahead of the meeting and then assume everybody’s read it, and then you start talking, and let them defend it.

Conde’s comments suggest there are actually two major potential problems with PowerPoint presentations. First, presenters are apt to use business jargon, 12-color charts, transition effects, and text-laden slides to disguise the fact that they don’t have a firm grasp on a problem or an issue, or to hide the fact that they are uncomfortable with detailed discussion about the problem or issue. Second, presenters dramatically overuse/misuse PowerPoint to create a presentation that participants would sacrifice parts of their anatomy to avoid.

As Conde notes, “The question from the beginning of the meeting to the end of the meeting is, ‘Have we added value: yes or no?’ And I would say that if the meeting is mostly the presentation of a deck of PowerPoint slides, you conveyed information, but you didn’t actually add value.”

An Effective Meeting

Unfortunately, some people just love to have meetings. In some instances, it is a great replacement for actually getting some real work done. In most cases, however, a manager simply hasn’t learned how to lead a productive meeting. So, let’s review the basics.

There are three parts of a meeting that must be done well for it to yield positive results: First, there is what happens before the meeting (the Agenda), then there is what happens during the meeting (the Leader), and finally, there is what happens after the meeting (the Follow-up). In fact, it is the follow-up process that ensures that all the heavy lifting done before and during the actual meeting results in good decisions and accountability.

Here are eight steps to follow that will help any manager produce shorter, more effective meetings:

1. Create an objective for the meeting (Before)
2. Create a specific agenda for the meeting (Before)
3. Ensure that any contributor to the meeting is fully aware of his/her individual role in the meeting (Before)
4. Establish a firm time frame for the meeting (Before)
5. Assign a note-taker for the meeting (Before)
6. Record all decisions, action items, and critical information (During)
7. Assign process owners to all action items (During)
8. Distribute notes immediately following the meeting (After)

As you can see, the success or failure of any meeting is largely determined before the meeting even starts. The first five steps are all about planning for an effective meeting (a novel idea, to be sure).  The balance of the steps are simply about good execution.

While a meeting is only as good as its agenda and follow-up process, the leader will ultimately determine the overall effectiveness of the meeting. Frankly, setting an agenda and distributing the notes after the meeting is not terribly difficult, but, if the agenda is poorly conceived or the notes outline a series of bad decisions or faulty action items, the meeting will ultimately be considered a failure.

And, if the meeting includes one or more of those PowerPoint monstrosities, you can bet your last dollar that meeting length is going up and meeting effectiveness is going down.

Tagged as: Leadership, Meetings, PowerPoint, presentations