Pro Meetings
I read – one of a million – posts yesterday that bashed meeting time as unproductive and busy work. That’s BS.
The reality as usually is more differentiated than this:
The amount of time that is spent well in meetings is a function of your total span of control and interdependence between your responsibility and others in the company.
Let’s break this down.
Total span of control
If you manage 8 direct reports and a total of 200 employees, meetings are in fact the best spend of your time. If you coordinate work with your direct reports well, there’s a multiplying effect when that coordination bears fruits down the road. When you manage a lot of people, it’s not your job to sit alone in a room and strategize day in day out or design beautiful artwork for the next ad campaign. Your job is to enable your team to do that at a larger scale and higher quality.
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Interdependency
When your field of responsibility has multiple touch points to other and influences them or is being influenced, you have to talk to these other functions. A lot. This negotiation and alignment is a vital and core function of any organization. That can’t be handled alone.
Why Meetings are good
Given the above:
- The more people you lead, the more time you will spend in meetings. And that’s a good thing. It’s called managerial leverage.
- The more complex and interdependent your field of work is, the more time you will spend in meetings. And that’s a good thing, too.
To come back to the starting point: When you work on a staff level position with no touch points to other functions, the majority of all meetings for you will be a waste of time.
In all other cases, it’s more about having the right meetings and running them well.
They are the central tool that you as a leader have to influence behavior in your organization.
So if you again hear someone say meetings are a waste of time: Tell them, they’re not.
AUGUST 4, 2022
