Your biggest performance potential

It is easy to run an executive meeting and discuss a new marketing strategy on fifty or more slides. It is also easy to speculate why things are not working as intended, why “the numbers” are not as expected and who should work on what to improve the situation.

This is where most executive meetings end. Everybody is happy that the meeting is over, and we can go back “to work” (nota bene: a meeting is often not perceived as work).

Not much will happen. Just before the next meeting, somebody must again prepare some PowerPoint slides for presentation and discussion.

This meeting scenario is what I see over and over again, at all levels and in all types of organizations.

The effect of such meetings is close to zero, just a waste of time and energy. Scrap them.

Instead, do the following:

1. Before setting up a meeting, ask: “What will be different after the meeting?” The answer to this question is your meeting objective. If you don’t find an answer, then don’t run a meeting.
2. Ask: “To achieve these objectives, do I need a joint agreement of several people?” Only schedule a meeting if your answer is yes.
3. Invite only people who (a) contribute to the decision, (b) will be accountable for execution of the decisions made, or (c) provide needed backup information for making the decision.
4. During the meeting, discuss ONLY those topics that directly relate to the achievement of the objectives. I see many meetings derailing at this point.
5. Most importantly, NEVER ever leave a meeting without WRITTEN and agreed next steps: WHO does WHAT WHEN? And WHO monitors this action list? Ninety percent of meetings fail at this point, which makes all the above efforts useless.

Don’t cheat yourself by hoping for good meetings. Instead, CREATE them.

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This post is from our Friday noon memo #109. Interested in regular updates? Sign up here.
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