Opened my inbox and was hit with an email titled, “Meetings Slowing You Down?” It was a vendor, offering an alternative to the painful process of sitting across a table from someone and trying to achieve a shared goal.
This isn’t new, we use emails, texts, voicemails (I think I remember those), short videos, all sorts of things to broadcast something. It may be a prospecting note, it may be a follow up to something someone sent you, it may be the next step in something you are trying to achieve.
But, as this email implies, these meetings tend to slow us down. We do everything we can to avoid them.
Ironically, it’s in these meetings, that the real work gets done. Somehow avoiding them is really about avoiding the work.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for emails, texts, even videos. Don’t bother with voicemails. They are effective ways for sharing information. But too many seem to be using these as excuses to avoid meetings. They seem to want to avoid the work of sitting down, exchanging ideas, figuring things out, and mapping a path forward.
What’s really going on in this tendency to find substitutes for meetings?
I’ve written frequently about friction, and that’s what happens in really meaningful meetings. Meetings where people sit around and agree with everything being said don’t accomplish much. It’s the meetings where there may be confusion, disagreement, lack of clarity or understanding, or even power plays where we really begin to accomplish things.
But these make us, and perhaps the participants, uncomfortable. We have to deal with human emotions and biases. We have to understand the people and what’s going on in the meeting, not just the words that may be said. But it is in these conversations, that the real work gets done and we move forward.
Why are so many meetings a waste of time? It’s because we have a tendency to avoid these issues, that we go through the motions or the standard scripts without really being engaged and caring about what’s going on. It’s that we haven’t prepared, that we have our own agenda, that we haven’t considered what the other participants want. And that they may not have done the same thing themselves.
Or when we multitask. When people around the table are listening with one ear, busy with their devices instead of actively participating.
Meetings become a waste of time when we engage in ping-pong conversations: Ask, Answer, Ask Answer. Instead we need to have collaborative conversations and to do this it is about connecting with other human beings.
These aren’t meeting problems, they are mindset problem. We don’t enter meetings purposefully, we don’t design meetings to take great steps forward. That we shy away from the important issues because they make people uncomfortable. That we don’t truly listen to learn and engage. That we don’t have a shared goal or outcome for the meeting.
Instead, we avoid meetings with endless one way broadcasts. Or we have too many meetings, because we waste so much time in the meetings we do have.
We want to accelerate our progress, we want to accomplish more in less time. But this progress comes at the speed of engagement.
Meetings don’t waste our time. We do!
Afterword: This is a great AI generated discussion of this post. The quality of these discussions and how they dive into some of the issues I raise in the post is really outstanding. Enjoy!
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