The Meeting Isn’t the Work - Your Morning Boost: A School Leadership Podcast

I have had a meeting to plan a meeting.

Honestly, I have even had a meeting to plan how we were going to have a meeting to plan another meeting.

Sadly, I'm guessing many of you have had this too.

And the worst part is, in my particular case, I'm not even sure we were wrong to do it that way.

We probably did need to coordinate.

We probably did need to get some things from figured out before we brought a larger group of people together to figure out how we're going to bring a large group together.

But I remember sitting there thinking this better turn into something because we are investing an awful lot of time just figuring out how we are going to spend more time.

And I think that is one of the easiest traps that leaders can fall into.

We can have a meeting that feels incredibly productive without actually producing very much.

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Meetings get an awful lot of criticism, and to be fair, some of them probably deserve it.

But I do not want this to become one of those conversations where we all joke that every meeting should have just been an email.

Some meetings absolutely should not have been an email.

There is work that requires people to sit together to wrestle with an issue, to hear some different perspectives and eventually come to some shared understanding.

There are decisions that need conversation.

There are problems that are easier to solve when the right people are sitting in the same room.

So I am not anti meeting.

What I'm more interested in is whether we are clear about what the meeting is supposed to accomplish before we ever put it on the calendar.

Not just what are we going to talk about, but what should be different when we leave.

A while back I was part of a meeting that started feeling strangely familiar.

And as it went on, all of a sudden I realized why.

We had basically already had this meeting.

It was the same issue, a very similar conversation.

We had many of the same people in the room.

So guess what?

It had a lot of the same ideas.

The difference was that the person leading the meeting had not been part of the previous meeting, and we had all done a really poor job of capturing what had happened before in the previous meeting.

We did not have a useful record of what had been decided, or what questions had already been asked and answered, or what was still not answered, or really even who was supposed to do what next.

So guess what we did?

We did it all again.

And I remember thinking about the cost of that and not the financial cost.

I'm talking about the cultural cost lost.

Because when people give us their time, their thinking, their attention, and then when we ask them to redo this again and do the same work because the organization didn't capture it well enough the first time, we're teaching them something.

We are teaching them that maybe the conversation really wasn't that important.

Maybe the decision was really not a decision.

Maybe there is no reason to invest too deeply because there is a decent chance we are going to start over again later.

That wears on people and eventually they start sitting back or they multitask.

They may just wait to see whether the conversation is actually going somewhere before they bother putting any energy into it.

And once that starts happening, the meeting may still look productive from the front of the room while the people sitting around the table are just slowly checking out.

That's why I keep coming back to one pretty simple what is different because we met?

Maybe we made a decision.

Maybe we made something clearer.

Maybe somebody now owns the next step so they can continue on.

Or maybe we finally got the right people together and solved a problem that had just been hanging out there for weeks.

The answer doesn't have to be dramatic, but there should probably be an answer.

Because if the only evidence that the meeting happened is that everybody remembers being there, we probably didn't leave enough behind.

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Of course, this leads us to the phrase and everybody likes to use this meeting could have been an email, okay?

And sometimes it probably could have.

If 12 people are sitting in a room while one person reads information to them that could have been sent in writing, I think it's fair to ask why 12 people needed to be there in the first place.

But I've also heard Leaders say I can't send it in an email because nobody reads my emails.

Okay, but then I think we need to figure out why that is.

Maybe we're sending too many.

Maybe they're arriving at random times, or maybe every other message is labeled important.

Sometimes people have gotten so used to sorting through noise that they're no longer sure which communication even matters anymore.

Years ago, I worked in one building where I thought the administrative communication system was excellent.

And it was really pretty simple.

We sent one weekly email and it was sent every Friday afternoon.

That's where all the information lived.

And the part that I think made it work was that the administrative team, we had to hold ourselves accountable to that system too.

We didn't spend the rest of the week sending random messages.

Every time one of us remembered something, unless something truly could not wait, it went to the Friday communication.

That made the expectation pretty clear.

Staff knew where to look, and we had done our part to make the communication manageable.

That made it much easier for me to say, hey, you need to read this.

And I think that's an important piece of accountability.

You can't create a chaotic communication system and then be frustrated when people struggle to keep up with it.

If people are not reading what we send, maybe the first question should not be what is wrong with them?

Maybe we should look at what we're asking them to sort through.

And then there's another option that I think we sometimes overlook.

Maybe the issue doesn't need a meeting.

Maybe it also doesn't need an all staff email.

Maybe we just need to find the three people that we need to talk with.

If that's the case, go find the three people.

I think technology has made it just so easy to communicate with everybody that sometimes we forget there is value in communicating with fewer people and doing it in person.

We can add 30 people to a calendar invitation in seconds, and we can copy an entire group onto an email just in case.

But involving more people does not automatically make the communication better.

Sometimes the best thing you can do is figure out who actually needs to be part of the conversation and then get those people together.

That protects everyone else's time too.

This might be the piece that matters most.

We have a lot of ways to communicate now, and none of them is automatically the right choice.

If people simply need information, a well structured email might be the absolutely perfect way to do that.

If people need to work through something together, that email, that might be a terrible choice.

If those three people I've been talking about need to make a decision, Maybe they need 15 minutes together instead of a 30 message email chain.

And we just have to figure out how to give them 15 minutes together.

And if something has already been decided, we probably need a way to capture that so that we don't have to keep reopening the same conversation every time somebody new enters the room.

The tool should fit the work.

And when the tool is a meeting, people should probably know what kind of meeting they're walking into.

Are we here to learn?

Are we here to solve something?

Are we here to make a decision?

One of the most frustrating meetings is the one where half the room thinks a decision is being made and the other half thinks everybody else is just sharing ideas.

Meetings like that, people walk out believing completely different things happened.

And that's not a meeting problem, that's a clarity problem.

I don't think the goal here is for fewer meetings just for the sake of saying that we have fewer meetings.

There are meetings that absolutely change the work.

People leave with a clear understanding, a decision gets made, a problem gets solved.

Maybe something that had been stuck starts moving again.

Those are meetings that are absolutely worth the time because you can see the outcome.

But the meeting itself is not the accomplishment.

The accomplishment is that outcome.

It is what happens because we met.

And I think it is easy to forget because putting something on the calendar that feels like action.

We met about it, we discussed it.

We already have our next meeting scheduled.

Okay, but what moved?

That's the question.

A meeting should create momentum.

It shouldn't just consume time.

So before you put the next meeting on the calendar, think about what the work actually requires.

Maybe it needs a meeting, maybe it needs an email.

Or maybe it needs a few people in a room for 15 minutes.

Or maybe it needs a decision that has already been made to finally stay made.

And if it does need a meeting, make sure something is different when people walk out than when they walked in.

That is how we respect the time people give us.

Thanks for spending a little time with me today, boosters.

And we will be back here again next week when we talk with you again next time.

That's your morning boost from AWB Education and Media.

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