How many times have you left a meeting not sure what the outcome was? Jo Cribb looks at an undervalued skill costing us thousands of hours of our lives in lost productivity.
We need to talk about chairs.
Not the ergonomic type. But the ones that could be wasting 25-50 percent of your working week.
Our colleagues who chair bad meetings. Meetings where no decisions are made, that have no purpose, no agenda, and a cast of hundreds wondering why they were invited.
For many of us the meeting grind constitutes about 37 percent of our time at work. For bosses, that’s even higher. An estimated 50 percent of this time is unproductive.
So in the next bad meeting, amuse yourself by estimating how much it cost your organisation in salaries. Probably thousands of dollars.
Or as some poor fellow worked out (probably during a dire meeting), the cost to the US economy of unproductive meetings is likely to be upwards of US$37 billion each year.
Given gathering in a room (virtual or physical) and talking is the mechanism we overwhelmingly choose to structure our work, getting them right matters.
And that starts with the meeting owner and controller – the chair.
A good chair will do a lot of thinking before summonsing you and sucking hours out of your work week. They will be clear about what the meeting needs to achieve, who needs to be there, what information everyone needs beforehand to be able to contribute, and how the meeting will run.
At the meeting they will facilitate a good discussion, ensuring points are shared efficiently and will work to find consensus. The art of a good chair is knowing when to bring discussion to an end, summarise the key points and propose the likely agreed decision.
But how many times have you left a meeting not sure what the outcome was? Too many times.
It is even worse when we think about boards. Board performance is linked to the quality of chairing. Poor chairing creates havoc: decisions not made, budgets not approved, strained and broken relationships between board members, and with staff.
But yet, 75 percent of us will not have received formal training on how to run a good meeting.
Current wisdom is that leadership is "developed’’ by poking and prodding around our communication styles, coaching skills, how we lead through others, being self-aware and discovering our authentic selves.
But how to run a good meeting is unlikely to be included.
Given how much of our lives are spent in meetings, that is surprising.
If we to want to learn how to be a good board chair, there are few formal opportunities to train, and options are usually one- or two-day courses. Given how important and complex this leadership role is, this doesn’t make sense either.
Perhaps we assume that great chairs who run great meetings will just emerge by osmosis from the depths of our organisational swamps?
That hasn’t been my experience to date. Some of the most experienced chief executives I have worked with still run crap meetings.
So we do need to talk about chairs.
That under-valued and under-developed leadership skill. That is costing us thousands of hours of our lives in lost productivity.
I have had a slight hesitation while drafting this column though. If all my future meetings are going to be productive and focused, when else will I find time to perfect my spiral and spider’s web doodle style and plan the week’s grocery list?
If you are a chair of a community organisation, this series of videos produced as part of the National Strategy for Community Governance is for you.
