The average employee will spend 392 hours per year in meetings. Each workday in the US, an estimated 11 million meetings are held—a total of more than a billion per year. With this much time invested in meetings, you’d think business leaders would have them down to a science.[1] According to Harvard Business Review, 71% of leaders said their meetings are unproductive and inefficient. Another 62% said meetings miss opportunities to bring their teams together. An equal number indicated meetings actually keep them from completing their own work.[2]

Leaders often fail to view meetings accurately. They should be a sharp tool used efficiently to move a project, a company, a group forward. Every meeting should be held with purpose. Consider the early New Testament church. Acts 2:42 says, “And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” Before you think, “Wait a minute, that verse has nothing to do with the meetings we conduct today,” consider that early believers had tremendous pressures on them, beginning the church, avoiding persecution, working together for the common cause of Christ. The believers met regularly, and they had specific purposes in mind. Meeting together for them was not a workday habit—instead their meetings had deep meaning and were to accomplish something.

The practical matter of meetings is that doing them well can lead to great improvement for an organization, while doing them poorly can stunt growth, harm the mission, blur common vision and reduce motivation. Author Patrick Lencioni, who penned the excellent book, Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business, writes, “The hard truth is, bad meetings almost always lead to bad decisions, which is the best recipe for mediocrity.”[3] Consider a few ways to improve your meetings, in order to rise above mediocrity and bad decisions:

Plan with an agenda. No meeting should be “just because”. According to Flowtrace, 64% of recurring meetings lack an agenda. Never meet to just meet, or “catch up”—there are more efficient means to communicate simple updates. Consider why your group is coming together and what you want to accomplish with that time. How will that half-hour or hour push the organization onward? As a practical exercise, write out four or five questions you’d like answered by the conclusion of the meeting, or a bullet point or two of specific progress. If you can’t do that, consider that you probably don’t need to meet.

With an agenda, also consider who you are inviting to each meeting. Everyone doesn’t necessarily need to be a part of every gathering. Most importantly, a meeting must have a specific topic, theme or area. A “kitchen sink” meeting rarely accomplishes anything of merit. Lencioni writes, “The single biggest structural problem facing leaders of meetings is the tendency to throw every type of issue that needs to be discussed into the same meeting, like a bad stew with too many random ingredients. Desperate to minimize wasted time, leaders decide that they will have one big staff meeting, either once a week or every other week. They sit down in a room for two or three or four hours and hash everything out—sales strategies, expense policies, potential mergers, employee recognition programs, budgets, and branding—so that everyone can get back to their ‘real work.’”

Start and end on time. About 50% of all meetings start late. Punctuality is a sign of professionalism, letting other participants know that you value them because you value their investment of time. Meetings leaders should arrive early, have any necessary items and handouts distributed, and be ready to start on time. Check out media, Wi-Fi access, PowerPoint or other technical matters ahead of time. Consider the time each person invests in a meeting. Every minute in a meeting is multiplied by the number of participants. If you have 10 workers in a meeting for a half-hour, that’s five total hours of work time. It’s the same as pulling one employee aside for more than half of their workday. Give great weight to that time.

Most meetings are 30 minutes or less in duration. Long, drawn-out, hours-long sessions devolve into tangents or gripe sessions. Time management also means every person in a meeting doesn’t have to talk—or even the right to. Present information to lead to a decision or action step—and no more than three of these. As soon as the meeting begins, press the meeting to its end. If you are able to accomplish in 20 minutes what you had scheduled for 30, congratulations, you’re leadership is increasing!

Don’t allow meetings to happen; conduct them. Ever hear an orchestra without a conductor? The pace of the music is off. Some instruments are too loud, others you can’t hear. Meeting don’t just happen; they must be led—or rather, conducted. A meeting, like a symphony, must have pace, high notes, low notes. Like a melody, the chain of discussion must stay on theme. Don’t be afraid to put your hand up when a tangent comes and say, “Let’s set that aside for now and discuss at another opportunity. We need to stay on topic so we can conclude this particular issue.” Conducting a meeting means moving it from beginning to conclusion.

It’s okay to have conflict, drama, questions, concerns, in a meeting. Avoid the trap of “groupthink”. Not everyone in a meeting must come to the same conclusion. But coming to a resolution often means hearing conflicting viewpoints in order to draw out key thoughts. Lencioni writes, “Meetings are boring because they lack drama. Or conflict. This is a shame because most meetings have plenty of potential for drama, which is essential for keeping human beings engaged.”

Move from discussion to action. Most meetings sputter out. Consider how yours might end on a high note, with a strong and clear call to action. Think about Jesus’ final meeting with His disciples before He ascended back to heaven. Through the Great Commission in Matthew 28:19-20, Jesus says, “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” What a way to end a meeting! Jesus summarizes the next steps, gives commands to His disciples, and ends with a line of encouragement. Yes, of course this spiritual instruction does not directly translate to a modern meeting, but take note of Jesus’ charge to action as He concludes the time with His disciples.

A number of years ago, a “State of Meetings” examined 19 million meetings through interviews with leaders and specialists. They estimated the cost of poorly organized meetings in the US alone at $399 billion a year.[4] Bad meetings are costly. Good ones can bring a team together, boost productivity, improve accountability, strengthen rapport and foster a positive work environment. Stop looking at meetings as a necessary evil, and instead invest in their with your full effort and with great purpose, so that each one becomes an opportunity for the organization to accomplish more.

Managing Meetings Well

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