Here there is no committee meeting

If there is one rule to remember about work meetings, it might be that they are a necessary evil. They are necessary insofar as organizations need them for proper communication, but they are evil in that they are almost never inherently desirable, and should thus be used as sparingly as possible for the sake of productivity and happiness.

Under ideal circumstances, meetings would be unnecessary. But circumstances are never ideal, at least on this mortal coil—which, come to think of it, might give us something to look forward to in the afterlife. As the poet Edgar Albert Guest wrote in 1920,

When over me the night shall fall,

And my poor soul goes upwards winging

Unto that heavenly realm, where all

Is bright with joy and gay with singing,

I hope to hear St. Peter say,

And I shall thank him for the greeting:

“Come in and rest from day to day;

Here there is no committee meeting!”

Arthur C. Brooks

"Meetings are Miserable," The Atlantic. November 17, 2022

the mere urgency effect

Another motive for meetings is what some scholars call the Mere Urgency effect, in which we engage in tasks—such as a meeting where each person recites what they’re working on, whether others need that information or not—to help us feel like we are accomplishing something tangible. If your spouse asks you, “What did you do at work today?” and you answer, “I had six meetings,” this might be why.

Arthur C. Brooks

"Meetings are Miserable," The Atlantic. November 17, 2022

a huge waste of time

If you, like many people, think work meetings are a huge waste of time, that might be because most meetings keep employees from, well, working: One survey of 76 companies found that productivity was 71 percent higher when meetings were reduced by 40 percent. Unnecessary meetings waste $37 billion in salary hours a year in the U.S. alone, according to an estimate by the software company Atlassian. And in case you’re wondering, COVID made things worse: The number of meetings required of employees has risen by 12.9 percent on average since the coronavirus pandemic began.

But the real problem with meetings is not lack of productivity—it’s unhappiness. When meetings are a waste of time, job satisfaction declines. And when job satisfaction declines, happiness in general falls. Thus, for a huge portion of the population, eliminating meetings—or at least minimizing them—is one of the most straightforward ways to increase well-being.

Arthur C. Brooks

"Meetings are Miserable," The Atlantic. November 17, 2022

transformation deficit

Business transformation will remain at the forefront in 2023, as organizations continue to refine hybrid ways of working and respond to the urgent need to digitalize, while also contending with inflation, a continuing talent shortage, and supply-chain constraints. These circumstances, which require higher levels of productivity and performance, also mean a lot of change: In 2022, the average employee experienced 10 planned enterprise changes — such as a restructure to achieve efficiencies, a culture transformation to unlock new ways of working, or the replacement of a legacy tech system — up from two in 2016, according to Gartner research.

While more change is coming, the workforce has hit a wall: A Gartner survey revealed that employees’ willingness to support enterprise change collapsed to just 43% in 2022, compared to 74% in 2016.

We call the gap between the required change effort and employee change willingness the “transformation deficit.” Unless functional leaders steer swiftly and expertly, the transformation deficit will stymie organizations’ ambitions and undermine the employee experience, fueling decreased engagement and increased attrition.

Cian O Morain and Peter Aykens

"Employees Are Losing Patience with Change Initiatives," Harvard Business Review. May 9, 2023

because they say no

Peter Drucker, in my view the father of modern management  thinking, was also a master of the art of the graceful no. When Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the Hungarian professor most well known for his work on "flow," reached out to interview a series of creative individuals for a book he was writing on creativity, Drucker's response was interesting enough to Mihaly that he quoted it verbatim: 

I am greatly honored and flattered by your kind letter of February 14th - for I have admired you and your work for many years, and I have learned much from it. But, my dear Professor Csikszentmihalyi, I am afraid I have to disappoint you. I could not possibly answer your questions. I am told I am creative- I don't know what that means. I just keep on plodding.... I hope you will not think me presumptuous or rude if I say that one of the secrets of productivity (in which I believe whereas I do not believe in creativity) is to have a VERY BIG waste paper basket to take care of ALL invitations such as yours - productivity in my experience consists of NOT doing anything that helps the work of other people but to spend all one's time on the work the Good Lord has fitted one to do, and to do well.

A true Essentialist, Peter Drucker believed that "people are effective because they say no." 

Greg McKeown

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown. Crown/Archetype. 2020. p.135, 136.

the pursuit of value

The trigger for any corporate transformation is the pursuit of value. Ideally, that entails both improving efficiency (through streamlining and cost cutting) and reinvesting in growth. But many transformation efforts derail because they focus too narrowly on one or the other.

In some cases, attempts to streamline the business through productivity improvements, outsourcing, divestments, or restructuring undermine growth. The cuts are so deep that they hollow out capabilities, sap morale, and remove the slack that could have fueled new endeavors.

Bharat N. Anand and Jean-Louis Barsoux

"What Everyone Gets Wrong About Change Management," Harvard Business Review. November-December 2017. 

our collective addiction to meetings

Attending too many [meetings] can be  highly stressful and tiring, and both productivity and quality take a hit when employees tune out, become demotivated, and lose valuable heads-down work time. As such, it’s hardly a surprise that managers in one survey reported 83% of the meetings on their calendars were unproductive, or that US-based professionals rated meetings as the “number one office productivity killer.”

But despite what seems to be an overwhelming consensus, endless check-ins, debriefs, all-staffs, and Zoom calls continue to plague the corporate world. What will it take for us to break free from our collective addiction to meetings?

Ashley Whillans, Dave Feldman, and Damian Wisniewski

“The Psychology Behind Meeting Overload,” Harvard Business Review. November 12, 2021

renaming meetings

Organizations are drowning in unproductive meetings, and part of the problem is the fact that we refer to them all in the same way. Vague and imprecise language obscures the true purpose of these gatherings, making it difficult to know how to optimize for their success. It also makes it harder to distinguish the worthwhile ones from the worthless.

In order to have fewer, more purposeful meetings, we need a more robust vocabulary to describe them. So let’s do some renaming, starting with three common “meetings” that you’ll soon realize aren’t really meetings at all.

• Meetings with just two people aren’t meetings. They’re conversations... 
• …sometimes people... huddle around a laptop or whiteboard to generate real work product together. Let’s call these group work sessions...
• ...meetings where the primary goal is to generate ideas… call it a brainstorm... 

Now let’s address a few types of meetings that are difficult to justify if you name them correctly.

• [Meetings] called primarily because managers have information to disseminate... These are convenience meetings  and almost always a bad idea. They’re typically convenient for the individual, and inconvenient for everyone else.
• Meetings called as a matter of tradition or habit — formality meetings — must also be banned... 
• Some meetings are called under the guise of collaboration or alignment, but it’s really connection we’re after. We can call these social meetings. 

Finally, we come to the decision-making meeting, a total misnomer as is it implies that the meeting itself is making the decision. But meetings don’t make decisions, leaders do. Group discussions can help support that process, of course, so let’s call them decision-supporting meetings to remind the leader that it’s her job, and hers alone, to make sure action follows...

Imagine a culture where people regularly talk about meetings using this kind of precise language. Picture someone pushing back on a meeting invitation by calling it a formality meeting... Better language isn’t the only step you must take to transform your meeting culture, but it’s a powerful start.

Al Pittampalli

“Stop Calling Every Conversation a “Meeting”,” Harvard Business Review. November 3, 2015 as quoted in HBR Guide to Making Every Meeting Matter. Harvard Business Review Press. 2016.

email interruptions

Researchers from Michigan State University say that keeping up with email throughout the day places high — and sometimes downright impossible — demands on managers that prevent them from achieving their personal goals and from being good leaders for their teams.

According to the study, office workers of all seniority levels spend more than 90 minutes a day just recovering from email interruptions and returning to their normal workload. For managers, these distractions caused by email have wider-reaching consequences.

“Like most tools, email is useful but it can become disruptive and even damaging if used excessively or inappropriately,” explains MSU management professor Russell Johnson, lead researcher for the study, in a release. “When managers are the ones trying to recover from email interruptions, they fail to meet their goals, they neglect manager-responsibilities and their subordinates don’t have the leadership behavior they need to thrive.”

Johnson and his team found that managers recover from these frequent disruptions by limiting their leadership duties, such as long-term growth and development of the team, and turning instead to more day-to-day tactical decisions and tasks. This recovery decision is both a strategic one and a way for them to feel more productive.

Ben Renner

"Study: Checking Email Less Often Leads To More Productive Workday, Especially For Managers". Study Finds. April 25, 2019. The study was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

prioritizing your work as a leader

"...author Stephen Covey coined Eisenhower's Urgent/Important Principle in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The tool is based on the way President Dwight D. Eisenhower prioritized the tasks that demanded his attention. This principle recognizes that tasks typically fall into one of four quadrants--and that we tend to complete them in this order:

1. Urgent and Important: Things that are important to do and need to be done now.
2. Urgent and Not Important: Minor tasks that are time-sensitive. It feels good to check these off our lists, but they aren't really critical.
3. Important and Not Urgent: Things that need to be done but don't have to be done immediately.
4. Not Urgent and Not Important: These tasks are neither important nor time-sensitive."

"A few years ago, I began organizing my to-do list into the following buckets (I have put them in recommended order and outlined my thinking for each):

1. Urgent and Important:  Do them because you have to, and delegate where possible to get tasks done right.
2. Important and Not Urgent:  This is the most important bucket because these things move us toward our big-picture achievements. The key to getting these tasks done is to make time each day or week to move toward your goals. 
3. Urgent and Not Important: Get these off your plate and don't let them distract you. Keep your eyes on the prize!
4. Not Urgent and Not Important: Do your best to avoid these entirely."

Robert Glazer

"Start Acheiving Your Long-Term Goals With This President's Task Management System", Inc.com, 20 Nov 2018

heartfelt efforts

In his decade as CEO of Campbell Soup Company, Doug Conant developed rituals for physically and psychologically connecting with people at all levels in the company, which he called touchpoints.

Every morning, Conant allocated a good chunk of his time to walking around the plant, greeting people, and getting to know them. He would memorize their names and the names of their family members. He would take a genuine interest in their lives. He also handwrote letters of gratitude to recognize extraordinary efforts. And when people in the company were having tough times, he wrote them personal messages of encouragement. During his tenure, he sent more than 30,000 such letters.

To Conant, these behaviors were not just strategies to enhance productivity; they were heartfelt efforts to support his people.

Rasmus Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter

"If You Aspire to Be a Great Leader, Be Present" Harvard Business Review. December 13, 2017.

habitual exercise

When people start habitually exercising, even as infrequently as once a week, they start changing other, unrelated patterns in their lives, often unknowingly. Typically, people who exercise start eating better and becoming more productive at work. They smoke less and show more patience with colleagues and family. They use their credit cards less frequently and say they feel less stressed. It’s not completely clear why. But for many people, exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change. “Exercise spills over,” said James Prochaska, a University of Rhode Island researcher. “There’s something about it that makes other good habits easier.”

Charles Duhigg

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. Random House. 2012.

replacing policy with principles

The curious thing about organizations is that having more people somehow doesn't equal more output. “As size and complexity of an organization increases, productivity of individuals working in that organization tends to decrease,” he says. As headcount grows, so too does the policy-and-paperwork stuff that gets in the way of rapid iteration and scale.

Why is this the case? “I think it comes down to human nature and the way we react to problems,” Curtis says. Our natural response to any problem — from a downed server to a social gaffe — is to try to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. In companies, more often that not, those solutions take the form of new policies. “What happens when you create a new policy, of course, is that you have to fit it into all of your existing rules.” And so begins a web of ever-increasing complexity that's all about prevention. Soon, you start to hit safeguards no matter what it is you're trying to do.

To avoid this type of bureaucracy from the very beginning of your company, you should adopt two particular tactics: “First, you have to build teams with good judgment, because you need to be able to put your trust in people,” Curtis says. “Then you shape that good judgment with strong principles.”

Minimizing rules that become roadblocks in your organization will only work if you’ve built a team that will make good decisions in the absence of rigid structure. Your hiring process is where you can take the biggest strides toward preventing bureaucracy.


Interview with Airbnb VP Engineering Mike Curtis
"Bureaucracy Isn’t Inevitable — Here’s How Airbnb Beat It" First Round Review. 5/18/2015