11 Meeting You Halfway
If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be “meetings.” —Dave Barry
Long story, short. Keep meetings lean by assigning time limits and moderators to get you out of the conference room and back into the game.
Defeat the Villains of Meetings
Meetings are a waste of time. Just ask any CEO.
According to the study “What Do CEOs Do?” by economists from Harvard Business School and the London School of Economics, “CEOs spend most of their time (85 percent) with other people. Meetings take up 60 percent of the working hours, and the remaining 25 percent is comprised of phone calls, conference calls, and public events.”

Some organizations have a culture that forces employees to spend their entire day in meetings. They have to complete any work they generate before or after these 9-to-5 marathons, or even on the weekends.
When you’re in a meeting, you’re not working. You’re stuck in a conference room, and all your productivity has screeched to a halt.
But how can brevity break the bonds of wasteful meetings?
In this chapter, we will explore ways to make meetings less painful and more productive. Let’s look at a few easy targets we can hit to make a dent:
1.Time: Reduce the amount we allocate for meetings. Too often, it’s predictable and indiscriminate. (Why an hour? Wouldn’t half an hour be enough?)
2.Type: Alter the basic format. Frequently, we’re holding a meeting wrong for the objective. (Why are people sitting if they could be standing? Where is the agenda? Why not a round table or no table at all?)
3.Tyrants: Take down the people that run, rule, and ruin meetings. (Why is the same person always talking? Do you really need a presenter?)
People get stuck in bad meeting habits and mired in the predictable and mundane. Regardless of the meeting type, brevity needs a seat at the table, forcing people to get to the point quickly and accomplish more in less time.
Meeting Villain #1: Time
Meetings often waste time because people schedule too much time for them. Trim your agenda to what’s necessary.

If you need to talk about one item for only 7 minutes, don’t allocate 10. It’s like your mother always said: Don’t put more on your plate than you can eat. Although 3 extra minutes might not seem like much, this habit will accumulate hours of lost time. Giving yourself more than you need is like throwing valuable minutes down the garbage chute.
Imagine an hour-long staff meeting shrunk to 30 minutes. What if every meeting started and ended on time? Consider meetings that could have flexible lengths that fit your exact needs, such as a 21-minute or 14-minute meeting.
Another enemy of efficiency is lack of preparation and purpose. People come to meetings without being ready or having a clear understanding of the meeting’s objective. Are you there to make a decision or to have a discussion? You can lose more than 10 minutes just trying to decipher why you are there.
To tackle this villain, consider giving people the first 5 minutes of each meeting to prepare and organize their points quietly. State the purpose up front and let them take this time to review what they need. This will prevent those who come unprepared from wasting even more time rambling to cover their disorganization.
The additional silence up front might seem strange at first, but it will set a nonnegotiable standard for preparing and having a clear point.
Meeting Villain #2: Type
There is very little creativity when it comes to meeting design. From the agenda to the way the room is set up, organizers often end up repeating old, tired habits, citing the excuse, “That’s the way we do it around here.” But to get more done, you need to find innovative ways for attendees to interact.

Design meetings to be succinct and to succeed. One approach is to stand in huddle formation to indicate you won’t be there for long. It’s a novel method that removes the comfort of the common meeting. Having everyone stand makes the gathering feel more like a timeout and less like a meeting that’s going to go long. This will create a stronger sense of urgency and purpose for everyone. You get to the point faster. People will know how to act.
Another effective way to change up meeting design is eliminating PowerPoint altogether. Speakers can use video, illustrations, or even have their comments drawn in real time by meeting illustrators. If you use a whiteboard to have people express their thoughts, you’ll see comments come to life visually—rather than being bored to death slide by slide. Immediate and lasting connections form when verbal and visual realities come together at once.
Meeting Villain #3: Tyrants
A widespread brevity killer in meetings is the tyrant—the dominant voice that stifles the chance for conversation. This Type A personality does most of the talking because of rank, personality, or position in the company.
Here are three polite ways to offset the overbearing voice:
• Assign active listeners. Debunk tyrants by appointing someone we call an active listener to moderate a more balanced meeting.
This role is strict: The active listener doesn’t speak right away but takes notes and listens for a common thread. His or her job is to keep the meeting short and succinct and to provide a final summary. When a dominant voice threatens to derail or distract the purpose of the meeting, the active listener is obligated to step in.
I’ve been in meetings in which the most senior leader took on this role; in others, it was democratically assigned to a different person every time. In each case, taking on that role sends the message that dominant voices aren’t welcome.
• “Stick” to one speaker at a time. Another approach is to use a talking stick. We have one in my house; it’s just a wooden spatula, but with such a large family, my kids all talk over each other at the dinner table, and we needed a way to keep conversations fair. Whoever has the spatula can speak while everyone else must listen. It is a prized possession, a great teaching tool, and funny to see in action.

If you say everything,then’ll hear nothing

If you aren’t disciplined to remove unnecessary information, then nothing will stick. If people are getting interrupted 50 times a day, checking their smartphone every few minutes, and having to attend nonstop meetings, they’ll likely miss every third word you say—unless you beat them to it and first cut out the fluff.

• Designate time slots. Finally, drown out dominant speakers by giving everyone a limited time to talk. Make it rule that only one person can comment on an idea so that you don’t have a pile-on effect. You have one-degree commentary and you move on.
There’s a number of other creative ways to run meetings. For more ways, check out books such as Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable …About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business (Lencioni, 2004), The Manager’s Guide to Effective Meetings (Streibel, 2002), and Boring Meetings Suck: Get More Out of Your Meetings, or Get Out of More Meetings (Petz, 2011).

Change the Format and Tone—Make It a Conversation
After serving as Commander General of the 82nd Airborne Division, General William B. Caldwell IV was chosen to go to Baghdad to work for Multinational Force Iraq as the Strategic Communications Director. Basically, Caldwell was selected to serve as the chief media spokesperson. Publicly, things were not going well in Iraq at the time. So he was handpicked to improve the communication effort in the area during these challenging times.
Gen. Caldwell’s predecessor liked to brief the media from behind the podium. He gave a very structured speech every week, like a lecture—a series of prepared, formal, and one-way comments, with limited time for questions and answers.
But Gen. Caldwell, who was new at the media game, wasn’t comfortable standing in front of the room and delivering a news sermon. He found it didn’t work for him—or the people listening. So he decided to bring in an executive table on his second or third media update and place it in the middle of the room. He removed the podium and rows with a new floor layout. He sat right at the table with the news media—like CNN, the New York Times, and BBC—all around, and simply engaged them in a conversation about what was going on inside Iraq.
Gen. Caldwell’s approach caught the media off guard. They weren’t sure what to make of it. But Gen. Caldwell was very conscientious of making sure that they all knew that he wasn’t going to waste their time. He was aware that the meeting was as much for them to gather information as it was for him to tell the story.
Gen. Caldwell prepared for the briefing over the course of each week. He used a Narrative Map to (at least try to) limit the reporters to 30 or 45 minutes. He would walk into a room, say hello, and then say, “I’ve got about 10 minutes of information to talk to you about—and then we can take questions for another 15 minutes or so.”
The media walked out with a better understanding of Gen. Caldwell’s message. Instead of just standing up and doing a typical Army briefing with slides, charts, and pictures, the key objective for him was to make it conversational. The new setting and approach ensured that everybody felt comfortable in the room and felt confident that they were getting their questions answered.
Gen. Caldwell is also a notorious note taker. He would take notes and write down names while engaging in conversation with the news media. Then if a subject came up during the week, he could call and directly speak to the person who’d asked about it.
He shifted the narrative from an official tone about the affairs in Iraq to a more open, conversational one. Gen. Caldwell formatted the setting and delivery so it felt dramatically different. His bold approach helped change the playing field.

Put BRIEF Back into a Briefing

Military briefings are not known for being clear, concise, or compelling; in fact, far from it. They are typically painful PowerPoint presentations filled with bullets and bad charts, low-resolution images, and poorly formatted graphs.
Jordan, a young military officer who works for U.S. Special Operations Command, took a different tack and strayed away from the standard approach. And he succeeded.
He and his troop had been working for several months on a CONOP, or concept of operations plan, to be submitted to a four-star general for final approval. “Once he approves the plan, we can execute it,” he said. “It’s a big decision point for us. All of us had been working on this for months with about 25 people touching it.”

The amount of time it took to plan, vet, and revise the document was significant. The PowerPoint ballooned to 30 to 40 pages as they briefed it to various agency and Department of Defense stakeholders.
“As you send it up the chain (of command) and all the different staffs and commands have a chop at it, everyone has input,” Jordan said. “[So] we wanted to get all the slides right.”
But they only had 30 minutes to brief the commander. So they really had to cut the slide count down.
“We wanted to keep it short: 8 to 10 slides,” Jordan recalls. Given the amount of trimming, everyone was fairly attached to the final set.
The final briefing, however, took an odd turn. More than a dozen people were in the briefing—Intel, Operations, and staff officers, as well as his unit commander and guys from his troop. And Jordan was the lead briefer. “A lot of stars,” he explains. Clearly, the stakes were high.
About 10 minutes before the briefing started, one of the four-star’s staff officers decided to pull Jordan aside to give him some pointed advice.
“All the four-star really cares about is to look into your eyes and know that you know what you’re talking about. So don’t really worry about the slides; just tell him the plan,” he cautioned Jordan.
A moment of truth: Should he brief with the slides, as he had planned all along, or simply have a conversation?
“I decided to give his advice a shot,” says Jordan. “I felt the slides were my safety net. If I got uncomfortable with the way things were going, I could always fall back into them.”
Even though there was some hesitancy to abandon the slide deck, especially with his unit commander there, Jordan felt that he’d received dependable advice from the staff officer. He explained, “This guy knows what he’s talking about. He knows the four-star better than I do.” And so he decided to take his advice.
Everyone walked in the room, sat down with paper copies, and waited for the commander to enter. Because he was running late, they’d need to complete the briefing in even less time than they’d originally assumed. After apologizing for his lateness, the commander asked for everyone to be introduced—and Jordan got the nod to begin.
As Jordan tells it, “At that point, it’s sink or swim. I’ve spent months and I know the plan, so I talked through essentially what we wanted to do in commonsense terms. There’s only one point where I referred him to a picture.”
“Because I’m sitting close and talking to him, he was very engaged. It was very much like he and I were having a conversation. He asked questions as we went through. Then at the end he turned to each of his staff officers and got their input.”
“And then, in a very jovial fashion, he says, ‘Hey, Jordan, do you think this is a good idea?’ And, of course, I said yes and everyone laughed. He said ‘approved.’”
When you are well prepared and have developed a plan that you’re ready to present, remember that people prefer a conversation and value your clarity and confidence. Jordan is now convinced that using a PowerPoint would have been a huge mistake. As he explains, “The commander was coming straight from a meeting. He’s got 10 to 12 sessions in a given day where he receives a staggering amount of information. If I’m trying to talk to him and he’s trying to read all this text and digest all these pictures on a slide, it would have been a very different brief. More likely, it would have been, ‘Sounds great. I’ll get back to you; let me talk to my staff.’ I don’t think we would have been as likely to get a decision right then and there.”

Afterward, a lot of people—including his unit commander— commented on the level of rapport he built with the commander. One even commented that he “treated you like his son.”
Since that briefing, Jordan has given a lot of thought to this bold approach and says he’s realized that “in most cases, the slides are less for the decision maker and more for the staff and subordinate commanders on the way up. Everyone wants to protect the decision maker. The slides are less valuable for the actual briefing.”
Long story, short. Keep meetings lean by assigning time limits and moderators to get you out of the conference room and back into the game:
• Is there a regular meeting in your organization at which you can employ the stand-up or the round table model? Try it once, and see how it changes things.
• Ask the key questions before you start the huddle: who, what, when, where, why, and how? Once you’ve hit those points, you’ll be sure to head in the same direction.
• Set a clear time limit and share that with everyone. Designate an active listener to make sure the meeting ends on schedule.
• Let each person know ahead of time how long he or she will have and which points each person will be responsible for covering. Be prepared to abandon the PowerPoint and just have a conversation; if you’re well prepared, everyone will welcome it.