To help you with your agenda efforts, an Agenda Template tool is provided at the end of the book.
Finally, let me close this chapter with some questions I commonly get about agendas that we have not yet covered.
How far in advance should an agenda be distributed?
Generally, two to three days is a fine rule of thumb. Sending the agenda in advance is especially helpful if the agenda requires some preparation from the attendees. Noting what preparation is needed will help to promote a focused meeting. In Chapter 9, we will look at a meeting practice where the first part of the meeting is actually dedicated to preparation: in other words, instead of asking people to prepare in advance, time is allocated at the start of the meeting to do the preparatory work. This ensures, of course, that everyone begins the discussion with the same amount of preparation. More on this later.
How rigid should you be on following the agenda?
There are times when you, as meeting leader, may have to be spontaneous and reorganize the agenda given some emergent crisis or event that occurred just prior to the meeting. Although this is certainly less than optimal, sometimes there is no other choice. It is okay to demonstrate thoughtful flexibility.
What is something you have seen a leader do as part of the agenda that was surprising and well received?
While you don’t want to overuse this technique because it may not come across as sincere, one leader shares at the end of meetings some fairly specific feedback around something each attendee did during the meeting that she felt was particularly helpful in creating a better experience for all. This positive reinforcement can increase the likelihood that the mentioned behaviors will continue to occur.
Can you cancel a meeting if you just don’t have compelling agenda topics?
Yes, yes, please yes, yes, certainly, a must, and yes.
Takeaways
1. Almost all business books on improving workplace meetings tout the meeting agenda as an instrumental tool. However, research shows that simply having a meeting agenda does not, in and of itself, result in a more satisfying or effective meeting.
2. In order for agendas to be effective, meeting leaders have to be intentional about their creation—agenda planning needs to be thought out carefully and approached with care, much like the process of planning an event. A good tip for making an agenda that is tailored to the needs of the team or organization—and will also increase accountability—is to reach out to attendees for agenda items.
3. In terms of other ideas for increasing the effectiveness of an agenda, I advise that meeting leaders place items that have to be covered near the top of the agenda. I also believe that the decision to use time allotments should be made on a meeting-by-meeting basis—they are not necessary for effectiveness, but they have their place. Finally, it is a good option to assign “owners” to agenda items in order to increase accountability.
4. Remember: keep your agendas fresh! Refrain from using the same agenda with only a new date. If you do not normally have time allotments, try including them. If you always have status updates at the beginning of the meeting, consider moving them toward the end. If you have employees who never participate, consider assigning them an agenda item to own. Agendas and meetings should not become stale.
Chapter 6
THE BIGGER, THE BADDER
In preparation for this chapter, I interviewed employee “Joe S. Lacker.” Joe was a big fan of large meetings. Although Joe is a fictional character, he is saying things that came directly out of interviews I have conducted.
ME: Thank you for chatting with me, Joe. Is it true that you love huge meetings?
JOE: Oh yes, the bigger the better. My ideal situation is a big meeting where there are actually not enough chairs around the table and I have to sit against the back wall away from the action.
ME: Tell me more about your joy of big meetings.
JOE: They are just so relaxing.
ME: Wow, I was not expecting that. Can you elaborate?
JOE: Large meetings are just a nice opportunity for me to recline, enjoy the clever contributions of a couple of my colleagues who are just so funny in big groups, and catch up on some emails.
ME: Hmmm.
JOE: Along with some well-timed head nods, I do set a goal of contributing once or twice just so folks remember that I was there. Although most of these large meetings are really not all that relevant to my job, the added bonus is that I do tend to learn one new thing over the course of the hour.
Big meetings, otherwise known as “bloated” meetings, are a fixture of organizational life. When I have done organizational meeting “audits” for clients, a common finding is employee concern about meetings having too many attendees, with over 50 percent of meetings containing two or more unnecessary attendees, given the stated meeting goals. Typically, this occurs out of a spirit of inclusiveness, an attitude of “the more the merrier,” an unwillingness to actually analyze who is truly needed given the meeting goals, and fear of political repercussions associated with excluding someone. Regardless of the motives, large meetings are undoubtedly suboptimal from a process and effectiveness perspective. In addition to sharing the evidence around the problems of large meetings, in this chapter, I discuss managing and shrinking meeting size without engendering a sense of exclusion in non-attendees.
The Case against Big Meetings: A Review of the Evidence
The horsepower of any meeting comes from the knowledge, skills, and abilities of the meeting attendees themselves. Thus it follows that as meeting size increases, more resources and perspectives can be brought to bear on the goals of the meeting—namely, more voices, more ideas, more information, and more brains to catch errors. In theory, this should lead to enhanced meeting effectiveness. Unfortunately, this does not appear to be the case. Marcia Blenko, Michael Mankins, and Paul Rogers, authors of Decide & Deliver: 5 Steps to Breakthrough Performance in Your Organization, discuss research conducted with data from Bain & Company. They report that for each additional person over seven members in a decision-making group, decision effectiveness is reduced by approximately 10 percent. Certainly, this math does not bode well for large meetings! Another study recently published in Group Dynamics: Theory Research and Practice examined the relationship between the size of a team and the quality of the group experience. In a survey of ninety-seven work teams, larger teams reported poorer-quality group experiences and higher levels of counterproductive behaviors, including more interpersonal aggression, more self-centered behaviors, and greater misuse of resources.
It is clear that larger meetings bring with them increased coordination challenges; the additional voices and viewpoints over and above the “essential personnel” can become unwieldy to manage and integrate. Perhaps even more noteworthy, we know that as meeting size increases, the probability of the “social disease” called social loafing increases. Social loafing is a human tendency to reduce effort and motivation when working in a collective; it is akin to “hiding in a crowd,” as Joe S. Lacker illustrated in his interview starting this chapter. Max Ringelmann, a French professor of agricultural engineering, discovered this phenomenon in an incredibly novel way: an experiment involving tug of war. Volunteers were told to pull on a rope as hard as they could, but they did so in groups of different sizes. The rope was attached to a device to measure force/strain so that the researchers knew how much they pulled as individuals and as part of collectives. Results showed that as group size increased, collective performance was incrementally lower than would be expected from simple addition of individual performances. Individuals in dyads performed to 93 percent of their ability, individuals in triads pulled to 85 percent of ability, and individuals in groups of eight pulled to 49 percent of their ability on average. These findings have been replicated in a host of different contexts. A recent study even looked at screaming: dyads shouted at 66 percent of what they did individually, and groups of six shouted at 36 percent of what they did as individuals. Taken together, it is clear that
we pull less when we know others are around to pull. We don’t give it our all; we shirk.
As meeting size increases, process inefficiencies and process problems increase given coordination issues and the like. Thus, the larger the meeting, the less optimally the meeting group performs, on average. The ultimate challenge, therefore, is to have the right number of attendees—not too few, and not too many. Not only is this good for meeting quality, it is also ultimately good for the employee; our past research shows that when individuals attend meetings not relevant to their job, their employee engagement erodes. I’ll now tee up the all-important questions: how do you decide who should attend the meeting, and what is the magic number?
It Starts with the Goals of the Meeting
In the next sections, I present a series of suggestions and techniques that should help you decide whom to invite to your meetings. To start with the obvious, the meeting leader should consider the goals of the meeting. For each meeting goal, the leader should ponder the following questions:
1. Who has the information and knowledge about the topic in question?
2. Who are the key decision makers and important stakeholders relevant to the issue?
3. Who are the people who need the information that is going to be discussed?
4. Who are the people who will implement any decision or act on the issue?
These questions can help you identify the relevant and necessary parties but still may result in a meeting with too many attendees.
Meeting Size: Rules of Thumb
Some companies try to create implicit norms to manage meeting size more broadly. Percolate, a technology company, created six meeting rules they distribute widely to employees, including by posting them on their website. One of the rules is “no spectators.” Apple works to stay true to Steve Jobs’s intolerance of large meetings. Two stories in particular have become Apple lore, continuing to shape Apple culture. First, Steve Jobs was known to (politely) throw people out of his meetings when he thought they just were not needed there. Second, and most famously, when President Obama called tech leaders to Washington, DC, for a meeting, Jobs refused to attend—just too many people there for it to be an effective use of time.
Aside from building cultural resistance to large meetings through communications and stories, there are some general rules of thumb that companies often propagate to their employees. Google often advocates no more than ten people being in any one meeting. Amazon has used what they call the “two-pizza rule”: the meeting should not contain more people than what two pizzas could feed. One manufacturing firm was so committed to keeping meetings small that they created a policy that meetings could not include more than seven people unless approved by a more senior manager.
Some rules of thumb can also be found in the meetings literature. For example, there is the 8-18-1800 rule. This guideline basically suggests that if you are trying to solve a problem or make a decision, keep the meeting to eight people or less. Brainstorming, however, could include up to eighteen people. Then, if the meeting is to just inform the troops and rally folks together, you can have eighteen hundred or more. In addition, John Kello, independent consultant extraordinaire who also studies meetings, advocates a rule of seven given the extensive social psychological research on small groups and effectiveness. This is consistent with my guidelines as well. Seven or fewer is the ideal group size for decision-making and problem-solving. Eight to twelve attendees is doable if the leader has outstanding facilitation skills. For idea generation, agenda setting, and huddles, fewer than fifteen individuals is ideal. Overall, a meeting leader wants to have the leanest meeting possible given the goals at hand.
Smaller Meetings and Hurt Feelings
Grousing about meetings is a foundational activity of most workplaces. We tend to complain readily about too many meetings. The one thing worse than having too many meetings, however, is the feeling of being excluded from meetings. Not receiving a meeting invite when we believe the content touches us even superficially creates worries about marginalization, isolation, and impotence. As much as it pains us to admit, being invited to a meeting is often viewed as an indicator of organizational self-worth and promotes feelings of being valued. While we might complain loudly about invitations to so many meetings, in truth, on some level, we relish the invitations.
Most meeting leaders want to avoid having others feel excluded, especially as they try to uphold organizational values reflecting high levels of collaboration, voice, and inclusion. By inviting lots of people to meetings, they feel as if they are enacting these values at a local level. Furthermore, they recognize the politics around meeting invitations—inviting certain people is just politically the right thing to do from a strategic vantage point. Taken together, as meeting leaders we are faced with a horrible quandary. Large meetings are not optimal, often leading to dysfunction and attendee dissatisfaction. Concurrently, excluding even tangentially relevant individuals can lead to hard feelings, angst, and burnt bridges. The challenge, then, is how can we avoid having spectators at meetings without engendering ill feelings? There are ways!
Techniques for Reducing Spectators That Don’t Undermine Feelings of Inclusion
To reiterate, the ultimate goal is to only include those necessary to a meeting, but not to create feelings of exclusion among those not attending. There are five techniques to do this. First and foremost, in examining your agenda and the goals listed, it might be the case that you could split the agenda items in a compelling manner, thus allowing you to hold two smaller and shorter meetings rather than one larger, more expansive meeting. This allows you to keep meeting sizes in check.
The second technique leverages a timed-agenda approach described in the last chapter. With this technique, the meeting boundary becomes porous—certain individuals arrive at certain times and leave at certain times. This is an ideal approach for being highly inclusive but without feeling the weight of too many attendees. That being said, this can get a little messy at times with folks coming and going. But I don’t see this as a bad thing per se. It helps to break rhythms and create energy. The key issue, however, is to press upon those entering at particular times the need to be prompt. My preference is to have them arrive a few minutes before their assigned entry time to be sure everything runs smoothly. A spin-off of this approach, which I prefer, is to order the agenda items such that the first items are relevant to the larger group of folks, but then after that item is completed, a group of attendees leaves and the remaining individuals continue on with the meeting. In both cases, the agenda timing strategy allows one to tailor attendance to agenda items in a compelling and strategic manner.
Research has demonstrated that asking for input from others, even if none is subsequently provided, engenders feelings of support, buy-in, and an overall feeling of inclusion. These insights inform the approaches that follow. The third technique involves gathering input from ancillary individuals before the meeting, in lieu of requiring attendance. Let’s say there are some individuals whose expertise may be of some relevance to a particular meeting, but, in general, it is really not all that consequential. If you want them to still feel some sense of voice, you can formally or informally survey these individuals in advance—they can provide input on a series of prompts that will be discussed in the meeting itself. This could include their ideas about topics, reactions to a topic, or other ideas for topics that should be discussed in the larger meeting. Please note, a response should not be required—but the key is that the opportunity is provided. At the meeting, when the agenda item arises, the meeting leader introduces the pre-meeting feedback received from the non-attendees. These reactions should be summarized and provided to attendees, perhaps as fodder to start the discussion. It need not alter discussion per se, but at least the content is made known in some capacity. Consequently, the non-attendee can feel some sense of connection to the meeting. Let me share a sample email as an example. Of course, the prompt will vary according to the meeting goals:
&nbs
p; Dear Joel, Jane, Sandy, Sasha, and Gordon:
As you may have heard, there is a group of us meeting (Jacob, Jessica, Debbie, Noa, Pete, and Ivan) to talk about ideas on how to improve our vendor procurement process. We know that you have some experience with this process. We welcome any input you may have on the following questions:
1. Ideas you have to improve the process?
2. Any key issues you think we should be aware of as we attempt to make improvements?
If you could share your thoughts by end of day June 1, that would be ideal. I know you are very busy so you may not have time to respond to this email, but any input is certainly welcome. Thank you in advance. I am also happy to loop back after the meeting on what was discussed.
The fourth technique takes another page out of the Google playbook and is an ideal complement to technique #3. Bloomberg News did a profile of meetings at Google and reported that Google is committed to capturing a complete set of meeting notes. Further, meetings at Google often feature multiple displays. One display shows, for example, the presentation/materials (if applicable). Next to the presentation is the display of the meeting minutes being taken in real time so as to create focus and minimize inaccuracies. Detailed meeting notes are often taken (1) to help attendees remember what was actually said during the meeting, (2) to help attendees recognize that what they said was actually heard as it was documented, and, most importantly, (3) to promote post-meeting actions being taken by directly responsible individuals as recorded in the meeting. These notes, however, can also be used to promote feelings of inclusion among those not attending meetings. This is usually a forgotten purpose, as the typical practice is to distribute meeting notes only to attendees. What I want to advocate here is distributing the meeting notes to a host of secondary stakeholders who, while not involved in the meeting itself, are still affected by the issues discussed in the meeting. The meeting notes can be provided to them with an email that invites questions, comments, and other remarks that can inform the next meeting. Typically, no feedback is received, but the invitation to review the notes is deeply appreciated by the recipients and promotes positive feelings of inclusion. So, while inviting secondary stakeholders would likely have resulted in just spectators, this approach in concert with technique #3 becomes a happy medium. To help you with your note-taking efforts, the Guide to Taking Good Meeting Minutes and Notes is provided in the “Tools” section at the end of the book.
The Surprising Science of Meetings Page 7