Blow Up Your Meetings - Keep Your Do-It Crowd Focused on Delivering

Most programmers I know dread meetings. Meetings are the bane of their existence. They interrupt their creative juices – for what they perceive as no value. You can easily extend this to other knowledge workers that are part of ‘do it’ team that are involved in the design, build, test and implementation of apps into your organization – either for internal or external use. I’m talking about the group that spends their entire day in the ‘do it’ mode. This is not the occasional floater that briefly touches the effort and is then gone. 

I’ll go a step further and state that most people inside of organizations hate meetings – they’re usually run poorly and don’t provide meaningful outcomes. Then, creating the need for additional meetings.

I’ve made the transition to management and my day is filled with meetings – that’s my role and I’m used to it. There are days where I think about just spending my time coding, but, professionally, those days are now in my past. Some of these meetings are tactically driven to look at individual efforts underway and to remove roadblocks, others are more long term or strategic in nature. Those of us in Project Management or Management sometimes forget that we hired these folks to be the builders and that’s where they should be focusing their time. While we need to minimize time that these people spend in meetings, it is still a critical part of their job that hopefully gives them a richer understanding of what it is they are brewing up.

Let’s look at what makes the ‘do-it’ crowd productive:

• Being a part of a team – the culture!

• Understanding that what they do makes a difference.

• Long periods of uninterrupted time where they can focus on solutions.

• Ad-hoc collaboration to solve specific issues – note the word ‘ad-hoc’.

• Ability to learn – technology and the business.

• A manager that keeps the ‘bureaucracy’ away from them.

• Spending an hour or more in a room to get the current status.

• People in the process who are supposed to be decision makers who fail to make decisions.

• Meetings that rehash information that is already known or decisions already made.

• Leaders of meetings that do not have any focus – meetings with no Agenda, leaders that ignore the Agenda

• Leaders that don’t encourage everyone to give their opinion or to be heard

• Attendees that do not add value to the meeting and divert the discussion or are not engaged

Now, let’s think about the things that your ‘do-it’ crowd finds disturbing:
There are a lot of reasons to hate meetings. Unless run correctly, they burn thru real dollars by diverting your talented team members away from the very jobs you hired them to do in the first place. So what’s a Manager or Project Manager supposed to do?

First, blow up your meetings. Ask yourself if a meeting is necessary or if a short one on one conversation with the appropriate decision make would be more effective – you can share decisions with the team without taking them away from their work. Personal conversations provide significantly more value in solving a problem vs getting 20 people in room to try and reach a consensus. Who really owns the decision? Maybe you need to pre-meet with folks ahead of time to collect ‘intelligence’ to share with the decision maker. Provide them with the information you’ve collected and get a commitment from them to get a decision if they aren’t able to make a decision in your conversation.

If a meeting is truly necessary – think about the following:

1. Replace your status meetings with stand-up meetings. Include only the actual team members and limit the discussion points to what is being worked on and what assistance is needed to remove roadblocks. The Project Manager then has the responsibility to communicate the status outside of the team. The teams focus should be on sharing with each other and helping each other solve problems. No team member should need more than a couple of minutes and then your ‘do-it’ crowd can get right back to work. And, stand up, literally means stand up. Do it in where your developers are sitting, pull them to a corner of the room.
2. Blow up your meeting – I know I already said this, but blow up your meeting! First, be stingy on who is allowed to attend your meeting. Ask yourself what value each individual can bring to the meeting and what issues they can help solve. If they have no skin in the came and are not accountable or responsible for delivery of the decision, than boot them out. Next clearly define the purpose of the meeting, what decision points you are looking to lock in during the meeting. Share your agenda ahead of the meeting along with the background of what is going to be discussed – each item should have a summary that the attendee can review that identifies the issue, what has already been tried, what recommendations are on the table and the pros/cons of each recommendation. Once you know your decision/discussion points, time box each item and include the discussion time in each agenda item. When the meeting occurs, don’t rehash the discussion points and potential solutions, but use the time to get to a drive to a decision. As a leader of the discussion, make sure everyone in the room contributes to the discussion.
3. Bonus points – don’t meet unless you’ve pre-worked the meeting. Take a walk around the building and solicit input from the stakeholders in the meeting. If the folks you need to talk to aren’t in the same building – use video conferencing (preferred so that you can pick up the non-verbal signals) or use the phone. Please, please, do not do this via email or via text chats.

Your job as a Manager or a Project Manager is to enable people to delight your customers. If your organization is needlessly dragging people away from the jobs they were hired to do, you are failing them. You are impacting their ability to successfully achieve the results you hired them to deliver to the organization. You are failing your customers by delaying meaningful changes that allow them to use your products and services.

How are you helping your teams succeed?

If you'd like more information on my background: LinkedIn Profile