At work our library is near our cafeteria so while heating up lunch I often sneak over to the library to browse. The other day this book title “Death By Meeting” caught my eye. While meetings are an essential to effective management of organizations, they seem to be a source of tension, struggle and ineffectiveness.

Death By Meeting (2004) is the work of Patrick Lencioni, a business consulting guru with a number of top-selling books to his credit. Most of the book is a fable about a video game company with really good people and really bad meetings. I’ll skip over the story and get right to the take home points. Lencioni highlights two problems with meetings.The first problem is this: meetings are boring. And the second is like it: meetings are ineffective. Meetings, says Lencioni, are boring because they lack drama. They are ineffective because they lack contextual structure.

The key to making meetings more engaging – and less boring – lies in identifying and nurturing the natural level of conflict that should exist. Leaders of meetings need to put the right issues – often the most controversial ones – on the table at the beginning of their meetings. By demanding that their people wrestle with those issues until resolution has been achieved, they can create genuine, compelling drama, and prevent their team from checking out.

Unfortunately, no amount of drama will matter if leaders don’t create the right context for their meetings.  The single biggest structural problem facing leaders of meetings is the tendency to throw every iss in the same meeting.  Desperate to minimise wasted time, leaders decide that they will have one big staff meeting once a week or every other week.  This just ensures the meeting will be ineffectice and unsatisfying.  There should be different meetings for different purposes:

If you add up all of the time that these meetings require it amounts to approximately twenty percent of a leader’s time. I am sure leaders spend more time than this in meetings.  But they need to ask themselves a basic question. “What is more important than meetings?” If they say “sales” or “e-mail” or “product design,” then maybe they should reconsider their roles as leaders and go back to an individual contributor position. If you think about it, a leader who hates meetings is a lot like a surgeon who hates operating on people, or a symphony conductor who hates concerts. Meetings are what leaders do, and the solution to bad meetings is not the elimination of them, but rather the transformation of them into meaningful, engaging and relevant activities.

If you haven’t read Death By Meeting I think you will enjoy it and hopefully get a better sense on how to improve your meetings. The approach in this book is similiar to the tiers of meetings that David Mann describes in Creating a Lean Culture. In my experience this works.  Mettings help us communicate but that doesn’t mean just getting together is productive. The goal is to create a system that makes our meetings effective and efficient.