The Surprising Science of Meetings Read online

  THE SURPRISING SCIENCE OF MEETINGS

  THE SURPRISING SCIENCE OF MEETINGS

  HOW YOU CAN LEAD YOUR

  TEAM TO PEAK PERFORMANCE

  STEVEN G. ROGELBERG

  Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.

  Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

  198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.

  © Steven G. Rogelberg 2019

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.

  You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Rogelberg, Steven G., author.

  Title: The surprising science of meetings: how you can lead your team

  to peak performance / Steven G. Rogelberg.

  Description: New York: Oxford University Press, [2019] |

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018006496 | ISBN 9780190689216 (hardcover: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780190689230 (epub)

  Subjects: LCSH: Business communication. | Meetings. | Leadership.

  Classification: LCC HF5549.5.C6 R634 2018 | DDC 658.4/56—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018006496

  Much love to Sandy, Sasha, and Gordon, the three people I would go anywhere to meet with.

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  Section I: Setting the Meeting Stage

  Chapter 1 So Many Meetings and So Much Frustration

  Chapter 2 Get Rid of Meetings? No, Solve Meetings through Science

  Section II: Evidence-Based Strategies for Leaders

  Chapter 3 The Image in the Mirror Is Likely Wrong

  Chapter 4 Meet for Forty-Eight Minutes

  Chapter 5 Agendas Are a Hollow Crutch

  Chapter 6 The Bigger, the Badder

  Chapter 7 Don’t Get Too Comfortable in That Chair

  Chapter 8 Deflate Negative Energy from the Start

  Chapter 9 No More Talking!

  Chapter 10 The Folly of the Remote Call-in Meeting

  Chapter 11 Putting It All Together

  Epilogue Trying to Get Ahead of the Science—Using Science

  Tools

  Meeting Quality Assessment—Calculation of a Wasted Meeting Time Index

  Sample Engagement Survey and 360-Degree Feedback Questions on Meetings

  Good Meeting Facilitation Checklist

  Huddle Implementation Checklist

  Agenda Template

  Guide to Taking Good Meeting Minutes and Notes

  Meeting Expectations Quick Survey

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  REFERENCES

  INDEX

  PREFACE

  Meetings are not in and of themselves problematic. Meetings are essential to teams and organizations. Without meetings, organizational democracy, inclusion, participation, buy-in, communication, attachment, teamwork, coordination, and cohesion would all be compromised. What we need to rid ourselves of are bad meetings, wasted time in meetings, and unnecessary meetings. This book is about solving these problems.

  Meetings consume massive amounts of individual and organizational time, with a recent estimate suggesting there are fifty-five million meetings a day in the United States alone. The costs of this meeting time are staggering when weighted with the average salary data of attendees. It is estimated that the annual cost of meetings in the United States is a whopping $1.4 trillion—or 8.2 percent of the 2014 US GDP. Furthermore, this tremendous time investment yields only modest returns. “Too many meetings” was the number one time-waster at the office, cited by 47 percent of 3,164 workers in a study conducted by Salary.com focused on workplace time drains. Translating this into dollars, one reasonable estimate is that over $250 billion a year is wasted by having too many bad meetings. And these estimates do not include the indirect costs of bad meetings (e.g., employee frustration and strain).

  Sadly, most companies and most leaders view poor meetings as inevitable because they don’t know of better ways or they try new methods that don’t stick, as they really are not founded in any scientific evidence of success. Also, bad meetings beget more bad meetings as dysfunctional practices become normative across the organization. Taken together, poor meetings become accepted as a way of life and a natural cost of doing business, like rain is a way of life in London. But, unlike the weather, meetings can indeed be improved.

  Drawing on over fifteen years of original research I have conducted on the topic of meetings with my team, surveying and interviewing thousands of employees from hundreds of organizations, as well as drawing from a large number of evidence-based sources, my goal with this book is to translate the science of meetings to bring direction, guidance, and relief to those leading and participating in meetings. While many people I meet are surprised to hear that there are social and organizational scientists who study meetings, this research has produced large numbers of scientific publications, conference presentations, book chapters, dissertations, and extensive media coverage. And, of most relevance here, this science has produced insights and practical applications that can directly benefit executives and organizations by promoting efficiency, productivity, increased innovation and employee engagement, superior decisions, enhanced commitment to initiatives, better communication, and a greater sense of camaraderie across the workforce.

  I wrote this book for any individual responsible for calling and leading meetings at work. This includes team leaders, supervisors, managers, directors, and senior executives across organizations and industry sectors. It is for learning and development professionals, executive coaches, and other educators who train and advise people on teamwork and leadership. It is for HR leaders and senior organizational leaders working to change the meeting culture at their organization.

  Each chapter in this book goes into depth on a particular vexing meeting derailer as a way of setting up evidence-based solutions. As a general approach, I bring light to the types of dysfunctions at hand in meetings, and then provide a set of specific best practices and solutions to help you recover wasted time. I make these recommendations on the basis of reasonable extrapolations from the evidence, and also by examining what cutting-edge organizations like Google and Amazon are doing.

  What counts as a meeting? Meeting sizes and meeting purposes can vary tremendously. In general, the focus here is on the most typical types of meetings found in organizations. They vary in size from two to fifteen attendees and generally are ostensibly about coordination, communication, decision-making, and monitoring. I cover everything here from the weekly meeting, to strategy meetings, to planning meetings, to task force meetings, to troubleshooting meetings, to brainstorming meetings, to debriefing meetings. That said, I can’t imagine a meeting type or situation that would not benefit from learning about what works and what doesn’t. Try applying what you learn here to a full-day retreat. Or to organizational training. Or to client meetings. Or to your community meeting, religious meeting, or PT
A meeting. Every situation involving two or more people coming together for discussion, communication, coordination, or decision-making can benefit from a thoughtful evidence-based approach—an approach that truly honors the time and commitment of all parties.

  Bad meetings can drain the life out of individuals and organizations. But meetings done well, leveraging evidence-based solutions like the ones we’ll explore in this book, can be transformative and hugely positive. The cascading positive effects of improving just one meeting each day, across people and across time, yields not only tremendous organizational benefits—from cost savings to better organizational strategy—but also individual feelings of satisfaction, engagement, and accomplishment. At the same time, leaders and future leaders mastering meeting leadership skills are uniquely positioned to elevate their own career progression and personal success as they become highly adept at working with others, building relationships, unleashing others’ full potential, and achieving team wins. Conversely, without these meeting leadership skills, one joins the ranks of so many others who bear the responsibility for the meeting “problem” and are the cause of so much frustration in the workplace.

  Section I

  SETTING THE MEETING STAGE

  Chapter 1

  SO MANY MEETINGS AND SO MUCH FRUSTRATION

  “I have way too many meetings.”

  Joe Nearly Everybody, employee in Nearly Every Company, Inc.

  Once I tell most anyone that I do research on meetings, I typically hear in response what I call the “meetings hell” lament. This lament usually includes comments such as (1) “All I do is sit in meetings”; (2) “If you want to know about bad meetings, follow me for a day”; (3) “We even have meetings on meetings”; or (4) “You need to study my organization, it is a case study for meeting dysfunction.” Relatedly, popular press headlines abound expressing similar sentiments—take, for instance, the article in the Harvard Business Review titled “Stop the Meeting Madness.” In fact, out of curiosity, I googled “too many meetings”: there were over two hundred thousand hits.

  This raises the questions: How many meetings do people attend each day? Has that number increased over time? While the simple answers are “a lot” and “oh, yes,” let’s unpack those answers in a more diligent manner. First, to be able to count something, we have to define it. By defining what a meeting is, we can start tabulating the actual number of meetings that occur across the globe more systematically. With that, a work meeting is defined as a gathering of two or more employees for a purpose related to the functioning of an organization or a group (e.g., to direct, to inform, to govern, to regulate). The gathering can occur in a single modality (e.g., a video conference) or in a mixed-modality format (e.g., mostly face-to-face with one participant connected via telephone). Typically, meetings are scheduled in advance (some notice is provided) and are informally or formally facilitated by one of the attendees. Meetings can be extremely brief (five minutes) to a full day in length.

  According to Elise Keith—cofounder of the software firm Lucid Meetings, who extrapolated information from the most commonly referenced meetings databases collected by Verizon, Microsoft, Fuze, and others—every day in the United States there are roughly fifty-five million workplace meetings. Yes, fifty-five million meetings a day in the United States alone. Forty plus years ago, in 1976, Antony Jay reported in the Harvard Business Review that there were approximately eleven million meetings per day in the country. Clearly, a massive increase in meetings has occurred over time.

  Now let’s take a look at how these massive numbers translate into the day-to-day experiences of individuals at work. Elise Keith’s analysis, consistent with my research, suggests that non-managers attend eight meetings per week on average, while managers enjoy twelve meetings per week on average. These numbers would certainly be higher for particular job types (e.g., white-collar jobs), and meeting demands increase as we move up the organizational hierarchy, with those in the upper echelons of management spending most of their days booked solid with meetings. As for this level of managers, there is some intriguing work coming out of the Executive Time Use Project—a group of professors from the London School of Economics and Columbia and Harvard Universities studying how CEOs spend their time. In one study looking at 94 CEOs of top Italian firms and 357 corporate leaders in India, they found that 60 percent of CEOs’ working hours and 56 percent of corporate leaders’ working hours were spent in meetings, and these figures did not include conference calls!

  To help put these numbers in context, I asked a set of executives each to tell me about a typical “day in the life” as it relates to meetings. I started with two CEOs. The first, a chancellor of a leading state university, reported that in his typical day he had seven meetings totaling nearly five hours.

  CHANCELLOR OF A STATE UNIVERSITY

  SEVEN MEETINGS TOTALING FOUR HOURS AND FORTY-FIVE MINUTES

  8:00–9:00 a.m. Routine status meeting with direct report with chief of staff present

  9:00–9:30 a.m. Routine status meeting with direct report with chief of staff present

  9:30–10:00 a.m. Routine status meeting with direct report with chief of staff present

  11:30 a.m.–12:00 p.m. Phone meeting with two other leaders to discuss ADA issue

  1:00–2:00 p.m. Meeting with candidate for the oversight committee

  2:00–3:00 p.m. Rehearsal for new student convocation

  3:15–3:30 p.m. Meeting about the search for a new director of a center; three attendees total

  The CEO of a large national advocacy nonprofit also provided me with a typical day. The day involved eight meetings lasting a total of six and a half hours.

  CEO OF A NATIONAL ADVOCACY ORGANIZATION

  EIGHT MEETINGS TOTALING SIX HOURS AND THIRTY MINUTES

  9:30–11:00 a.m. Meeting with Executive Leadership Team (ten people in this meeting)

  11:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m. Meeting with Counsel re: litigation (four people in this meeting)

  12:00–12:30 p.m. Meeting with CFO (two people in this meeting)

  1:00–1:30 p.m. Call with Executive Committee of External Board (seven people in this meeting)

  1:30–2:00 p.m. Meeting with SVP of Human Resources (two people in this meeting)

  3:00–3:30 p.m. Interview with iHeart Radio

  4:00–5:00 p.m. Meeting to discuss international communications strategy and fundraising (six people in this meeting)

  5:30–6:30 p.m. Meeting with a national journalist

  Next, I discussed meeting load with a senior vice president and chief human resources officer at one of the largest global food and beverage companies in the world. The day she shared with me, which she indicated was typical, involved six and a half hours in meetings, with a number of her meetings on this particular day dedicated to preparing for a future meeting: an annual succession planning meeting with a sector CEO.

  SENIOR VP OF A HUMAN RESOURCES AND TALENT MANAGEMENT AT A GLOBAL FOOD AND BEVERAGES COMPANY

  SIX MEETINGS TOTALING SIX HOURS AND THIRTY MINUTES

  8:00–9:00 a.m. Meet with business leader and three direct reports to prepare for annual succession planning meeting with sector CEO

  10:00–11:00 a.m. Discussion meeting with two direct reports around strategy for an executive assessment program

  11:00 a.m.– 12:00 p.m. Meeting with another business leader to prepare for our succession planning meeting with our sector CEO (five people at this meeting)

  1:00–2:00 p.m. Meeting with five business leaders to make sure our slates are all aligned for our upcoming succession planning meeting with the sector CEO (six people at this meeting)

  2:30–4:30 p.m. People planning prep—meeting another business leader (SVP of Sales) to prepare for succession planning (four people in this meeting)

  4:30–5:00 p.m. External partner meeting—phone call with external strategic partner to discuss employee transition project (six people on this call)

  Why Are There So Many Meetings?

 
; Clearly, there is a great deal of meeting activity going on at work, especially for those toward the top of the organization. This again raises the question why are there so many meetings. Putting aside the fact that some leaders may overuse meetings given their personal proclivities (e.g., an unwillingness to make a decision; a desire to “appear” active to others), the answer to this question is multifaceted and in many ways reflects a changing societal and organizational zeitgeist around work. Beliefs around the value and benefits of employee inclusion, of empowerment, of teams, of employee buy-in, and of employee engagement are more prominent than ever as efficient ways to achieve short-term and long-term organizational survival and success. Meetings are a key mechanism to express these values.

  Relatedly, democratization has penetrated deeply into organizational life, with “command and control” leadership models becoming less dominant. Instead, organizations have become flatter and less hierarchical. Again, all roads lead to more meetings—the mechanism to bring people together, gain input, promote discussion, promote synergy, provide voice, explain things, coordinate, foster ownership, and learn and grow as a unit. In the Harvard Business Review article mentioned at the start of this chapter, a senior executive from a pharmaceutical company noted:

  I believe that our abundance of meetings at our company is the Cultural Tax we pay for the inclusive, learning environment that we want to foster . . . and I’m ok with that. If the alternative to more meetings is more autocratic decision-making, less input from all levels throughout the organization, and fewer opportunities to ensure alignment and communication by personal interaction, then give me more meetings any time!

  While in Chapter 2 I will argue that the elimination of meetings in and of themselves is absolutely a false goal—the goal should actually be to eliminate ineffective and bloated meetings—it is still important to take stock of what meetings are implicitly and explicitly costing an organization, and what the return is on that investment.