“We need more people!”
When a new strategic initiative is proposed, the first response is often a request for more people, more budget, or more time. Maybe that’s needed. But before adding resources, take a look at where your team’s hours already go.
With clients I work with, I often find that a healthy (or should I say, unhealthy) share of those hours go to meetings that end without a decision, a next step, or much reason to have met at all. Getting those hours back creates valuable time for the new work.
You’ve probably been in these. Maybe it’s a team preparing to launch a new service. You’ve got Sales there wanting a launch date, Operations calling out an issue, and Marketing wanting to know what it can promise customers. There’s no explicit purpose for the meeting, but it’s on the calendar, so eight people get together every week to talk about it.
Someone asks afterward what got decided. “We’re talking about it again next week.”
I’ll be honest, I’ve scheduled plenty of these meetings myself in the past. I bet you have, too. Let’s give people some of that time back so they can move the work forward.
These meetings are often the result of a lack of clarity up front. And when the meeting ends without clearing anything up, everyone gets to have it again next week.
So, a lack of clarity turns into a lack of capacity, execution suffers, and the strategy struggles to deliver the results it promised. It’s not a great cycle.
Fixing it takes a little more planning before sending the invite.
Define the meeting objective. Put that objective in the invite, along with anything people need to prepare. “Decide whether to fix the billing issue before launch or launch with a temporary workaround” gives people a specific decision to prepare for. If you can’t come up with a clear and meaningful objective, cancel the meeting.
Give every person a specific reason to be there. Define—and write in the agenda—what each person will contribute or what they’ll do differently afterward. If you can’t answer for a particular person, they don’t need to be there. If you can’t answer for anyone, you don’t need the meeting.
Constrain the time. Could it be 15 minutes, or even 10? Calendar defaults push meetings to 30 or 60 minutes, and meetings tend to expand to fill the slot. For that billing decision, send the options and your recommendation ahead of time. Use the meeting to hear concerns, make the decision, and agree on who does what next. You might only need 15 minutes. Get right to it, and end when you’ve accomplished what you came to do.
Then put the time you get back toward the work you’ve said matters most. Otherwise, it’s likely to fill up again.
Try it on the next meeting you schedule (or don’t schedule). Dedicating a few extra minutes up front might shorten the meeting, cut a few names from the invite, or tell you it doesn’t need to happen at all.
Then take advantage of your newly created capacity to bring your initiative to life.
