Meeting Expectations

“You should never go to a meeting or make a phone call without a clear idea of what you are trying to achieve.”

• Steve Jobs (1955 – 2011), co-founder and two-time CEO of Apple

Welcome back to a week-long rant about meetings. For the benefit of your business. For the sake of your sanity. And, candidly, for the love of Pete!

I led a $120 million Group of a public company for a few years, and every stinking Monday at 10 AM the entire executive team would meet for close to two hours to go over our forecasts with a fine-toothed comb, as the old saying goes. Forecasts are critical, maybe even more so for publicly-traded companies. I quit going to the meeting (Named “Monday Life Suck” in private) three weeks into my six-year tenure.

Four weeks later, my boss called and asked why I’d missed four straight forecast calls. “It’s all right there in the report,” I told him. “C’mon Hes! You can hear Randy and Mike go through their forecasts, as well,” he pleaded. “Randy and Mike and I talk about our business all the time,” I said, “usually right before we publish our forecasts every Friday at 2 PM.”

The expectation was that we would attend a meeting whose sole purpose was for highly paid executives to read spreadsheets. To each other! For 120 minutes! And we usually ran at least thirty minutes long! And after usually starting eight minutes late. For those of you doing the math, ten people, 1580 minutes, zero productivity. Bupkus. Nada. Nothing, other than time to daydream about ways to harm ourselves as an alternative to the meeting.

Here’s a better expectation for a forecast meeting: “Team, the forecasts have been in your inbox since Friday at 2 PM. Monday at 10 AM, please bring two questions about every other member of the team’s forecast. The order of review is in the agenda. We will stay on time. Get deep. Probe. Look for ways to enhance the business or for gaps in data that make you wonder. Let’s make each other better. Please post your questions by 9:30 Monday before the meeting. The presenter can pick one, one of you can pick one and I’ll pick one. We’ll limit each review to ten minutes. Follow-up actions and outcomes should be listed in your forecast for Friday.”

Here’s a better expectation for your operations meeting: “Team, it looks like we slipped below 90% for on-time project completion. Let’s discuss why that happened, and for each possible cause, bring at least one solution or means of addressing it. We’ll limit the meeting to fifty minutes, and we’ll start and end on time.”

Here’s a better expectation for your _____________ meeting:

• It will start on time, with only those necessary in attendance, and with a clear, prior-released agenda.
• It will have a clearly defined, quantifiable objective.
• Each person will be expected to participate and will have completed defined pre-work or research for the meeting.
• Disagreement or challenges will be expected, encouraged, and drawn-out if not offered.
• Decisions will be made.
• Action will be prescribed.
• The method by which the action will be measured will be agreed upon.

Ideally, it will be scheduled to start at five minutes past the hour and end in the shortest time possible to cover the agenda and expectations. Ending at :25 or :55 past the hour gives people time to go potty before their next meeting, which won’t be as good as yours if you follow these basics.

Meeting the boss’s expectations is important, and it will be easier for your team to meet expectations if you expect all meetings to follow these guidelines—and that they actually do.

Tomorrow, the costs of the hangover from bad meetings. Stay tuned!