Latest / UNLEASHED By LoyaltyOps / Your Meetings Are Multiplying. Nothing Is Getting Done.
Transcript
- Mickey Anderson: Let me give you a number. A leadership team of eight people. 15 hours per week in meetings, which is conservative for most organizations. 30 % of that time structurally unproductive because the meeting had no defined purpose, produced no clear decision, and ended without a named owner. That is over 200 hours of combined senior leadership team. per quarter that produced nothing that will hold past the end of the week. Our days are full, our calendars are packed, and yet important work keeps not getting done. We're not talking about time management. This is a structural problem, and most organizations are solving for the wrong thing. Meetings multiply because they become the default coordination mechanism. when the structure that should handle coordination is absent. There are three common failure modes that come from this, and you already know the first failure. When decision ownership is unclear, when nobody knows who has the authority to make a specific call, the group assembles to hash it out. The meeting becomes the decision-making mechanism. That was episode two. The second failure is missing communication standards. When the organization has no defined structure for how context gets shared, leaders attend meetings to learn what's happening. They're not there to decide anything. They're there to stay informed. A structure that does not require their presence in the room would give them the same information at a fraction of the cost. The third failure is no visible accountability system. When follow through is not tracked structurally, meetings serve as the accountability check. The weekly status call exists because there's no other way to confirm commitments from last week were completed. That was episode three. Three structural failures, and each one generates its own category of meeting. Together, they fill calendars. Today, we're going to talk about how to replace them with something that actually works. The first discipline in building a meeting system is defining your meeting types. Most organizations have no meeting types. They have meetings. Every topic finds its own slot on the calendar. Every recurring need becomes a recurring meeting. The calendar grows because nothing ever gets questioned. The discipline here is to define a small number of meeting types. Four or five. And require that every meeting fits into one of them. If it doesn't fit, it doesn't get a slot. Each meeting type is defined by five criteria. All five. If a meeting can't answer all five, it's not ready to be on the calendar. The first, purpose. One sentence. Why does this meeting exist? And it's not to discuss priorities, but a specific function it performs that no other meeting duplicates. The second, required outcome. What must be true when this meeting ends? Concrete, observable, not feel aligned. Something you can point at. A documented decision, a clear blocker, a set of name priorities. Third, cadence. How often does this meeting run? And it's worth noting that most people start here and build outcome and purpose afterwards. But in reality, this should be dictated by the purpose and the outcome. Is it daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly? Cadence isn't about habit. It's a structural decision about what this meeting is designed to hold. Now the fourth, often skipped, is mandatory attendees. These are the minimum viable set of people this meeting cannot function without. Everyone else is optional. Most meetings carry too many people because nobody defined who actually needs to be there. Fifth, decision type. What kind of decisions this meeting is designed to produce? And this one matters enough to spend a moment on it. There are four decision types. We have collective, where the group decides together. Everyone in the room has a real vote. Then we have consultative, where one person decides after hearing input from the group. The group's job is to inform the decision, not to make it. Next is independent. where one person decides without group input and this one doesn't need a meeting. Then we have escalated where the decision exceeds local authority and must go up. The most expensive meeting dysfunction I see is a consultative decision being treated as a collective one. A group of 10 people argues for two hours towards consensus on a decision that was always one person's call. Naming the decision type before discussion begins removes that problem entirely. Every meeting, regardless of type, requires three roles to be named before it starts. The facilitator, who owns the structure of the meeting. Their job is to run the meeting. They protect the purpose, manage the time, and keep the conversation on track. The facilitator is not necessarily the most senior person in the room. They're the person responsible for the meeting producing its intended outcome. When the facilitator role is absent or assumed, the strongest personality in the room sets the direction by default. That's not a meeting. That's a conversation with a calendar invite. Now it's worth noting that the facilitator role can rotate. And in certain types of meetings, it's encouraged to because you can get engagement and help people learn to lead meetings through exposure here. The next role is the scribe. And no, it's not your AI note taker. The scribe owns the memory of the meeting. They capture the decisions with their owners and deadlines, every commitment made, any items left unresolved, and they send the notes before the day ends. I do not recommend having the facilitator and the scribe be the same person. The facilitator needs to be present and run the meeting. And if they are also taking notes and documenting things on a dashboard, they are not fully engaged and doing the best job they can running the meeting. The scribe needs to be fully present, taking notes, capturing decisions, and really documenting as much as possible. They will also be responsible for reviewing AI notes after the meeting to ensure everything is captured properly. When the scribe role is absent, the meeting produces discussion, but not a durable record. And your AI notes aren't a durable record. They're usually stashed away in some app you never touch and no one looks at. Commitments made at two in the afternoon are contested by four. People remember different outcomes from the same conversation. The next meeting opens by reconstructing what the last one decided. The scribe role is essential. Next are the mandatory attendees. And these are the people whose presence is required for the meeting to function. Everyone else is optional. Before every meeting type is defined, the leadership team names the minimum set. When people are added beyond that minimum, it's a deliberate decision, not a default. Now, a meeting is won or lost before anyone enters the room. The first before meeting standard is the brief. Meetings that require decisions or complex discussion should include a written brief sent at least 24 hours in advance. Now, there are the Amazon examples where you'll dedicate time within the meeting to reading the brief. But giving people information in advance to process research and understand allows you to dig into the meeting and respect people's time. A good brief contains three things. The relevant context, the current status, and the specific question or decision the meeting needs to produce. When a brief exists, the meeting spends its time deciding. When a brief is missing, most of meeting is spent catching up. and a meeting that spends time catching up typically doesn't have enough time left to decide. Now the second meeting standard is confirmation. Every participant confirms they understand the purpose and expected outcome before they arrive. Mandatory attendees are confirmed. The facilitator and scribe are named. And if any of these are missing when the meeting is scheduled to start, the meeting's not ready to happen. When the meeting starts, the facilitator states the purpose and expected outcome out loud before any other conversation begins, before your segue, before your check-ins. This sets the tone. It should be every time. And it's not for formality. It's for signal that the meeting has a destination. When a decision comes up, the facilitator names the decision type before discussion begins. consultative or escalated. And this one step removes the ambiguity that turns a 20-minute consultative decision into a 90-minute argument about consensus. Ownership is defined on every decision and every commitment before the meeting closes. One person's name, one deadline. The owner confirms out loud that they own it, not a team. Now, we'll figure it out. One person, one deadline. Before the meeting ends, the scribe reads back every commitment that was made in the room. Owner, action, deadline. And every person confirms the commitment was captured properly. The meeting doesn't close until that's done. Now, most meeting failure happens after the meeting ended. The scribe sends the notes before the day ends. Decisions with their owners, commitments with their deadlines, open items with their owners, and the notes go to every attendee and to anyone whose work is affected by the decisions made. Same day, not tomorrow, not when there's time. Same day. And that standard only works if it's a non-negotiable. This helps build context meeting after meeting, and this is why defining that scribe role and understanding the commitment the scribe makes to the meeting is essential. Owners update their commitment status before the next review, not during it. When status updates live only in people's heads, the next meeting starts with 20 minutes of reconstruction. But when status is visible before the meeting starts, The meeting can skip that update section and get straight to the work. For high stakes decisions, confirm understanding with the people affected. This can be a brief note. It doesn't need to be a long message. That restates the decision and its implications. Now the goal here is to resurface misunderstanding before it costs six weeks of effort and more meetings. Now here's what I want you to do. This week. Open every recurring meeting on your calendar. For each one, answer four questions. One, what's the defined purpose of this meeting in one sentence? Two, what's the required outcome, something concrete that must be true when it ends? Three, who are the mandatory attendees, the minimum, not everyone currently involved on the invite? And four, does this meeting have a named facilitator and a named scribe? Any meeting that cannot answer all four questions is structurally broken. It still may be producing value through the energy of the people involved, but it's doing that in spite of the structure, not because of it. Mark every meeting that cannot answer all four, and that is your starting list. Then, and this is your second action, bring your leadership team together for 90 minutes. The agenda is to define your four or five meeting types for your organization. For each type, write the purpose, the required outcome, the cadence, the mandatory attendees, the expected decision type, the facilitator assignment, and the scribe assignment. Then, write the before, during, and after meeting standards that every meeting type follows. Now what comes out of that session is your V1 meeting standards document. In one session, with one document, you can build the foundation for every meeting your organization runs from that point forward. Now the goal is not fewer meetings. That's typically the outcome. The goal is that meetings earn their place on your calendar. When a meeting has a type, a purpose, a defined outcome, named roles, and before, during, and after discipline, it does something that the calendar can not otherwise do. It produces durable results. It moves the work. The meetings that can't meet that standard get replaced by something better. A brief, a tracked commitment, a structured update that doesn't need a live audience. Do the audit. Build the standards. And your calendar will tell you everything you need to know. Subscribe to Unleashed and hit that bell icon so you get notified when we release the next episodes. I'll see you there. Finally one together