Meeting-itis

Dear Bob …

I’m getting meetinged to death.

I’m the CIO of a medium-size company (about 1,000 employees total). Last month alone, I logged 157 hours in meetings by actual count, which didn’t leave a whole lot of time to do my real job. Whatever that is … I’ve lost track.

How do I get out of this?

– Living in Meeting Purgatory

Dear Purgatious …

It’s a common complaint. It isn’t easily fixed, either, but it is fixable.

To understand how to solve the problem, you first have to understand how you got into this mess. Meeting-aholism has three causes, which can happen singly or in combination.

The first is the need to be involved in decisions. Many executives fall into this trap and become organizational choke points. The big mistake that gets them into this mess is delegating recommendations instead of decisions. When you don’t delegate the authority to make a decision, you’ve invited yourself to at least one meeting to review recommendations, and probably to a bunch of update meetings along the way, too.

The solution to this problem is simple: Delegate decisions whenever possible. Sure, there are risks. Which simply means you need to become very good at delegating, and at developing staff so they can excel without needing you to review their work.

The second cause of too many meetings is the converse of the first – people value your participation and want you involved. That’s a good thing. The solution isn’t too hard, either: Delegate. Which is to say, choose which of these meetings you attend carefully, and for the rest either delegate attendance to members of your organization, or delegate to the remaining committee members (“You don’t need me. You know more about the subject than I do – I trust you to make the right decisions.”)

The third cause is the thorniest: Too many meetings spawn more meetings. Once calendars start to get crowded, everyone in the company learns the unstated rule: No work gets done except in meetings because there just isn’t time. So meetings are convened to reserve time, and work that could be performed by individuals instead is performed by committees.

You can’t cure this by yourself, but you can escape from the madness, at least partially. Make appointments with yourself. Enter them into your calendar system. Leave enough open time for a reasonable number of meetings – say 20 to 25 hours per week. Then hold firm, and when you do need to use some of your reserved time for a meeting, schedule a different appointment with yourself to make up for it.

You might have to do some preparatory work first. In particular, you might need to review your standing meetings and withdraw from some of those committees. Which gets back to delegating again.

In the end, organizations that are consumed by meetings are usually organizations that are consumed by distrust. You don’t trust people to make the right decision without your input, neither does anyone else, so everyone has to participate in everything.

Ugh.

– Bob

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