The biggest expense for any business isn’t on the P&L; it’s opportunity cost. We can chase our tails to save $500 and miss $500,000. Why do we do this?
The Root Of Opportunity Cost
Bad decision making. Why do people make bad decisions? In a word, indecisiveness. From everything I’ve studied about successful people in the last 20+ years, there’s one common denominator that I see nearly across the board. Successful people make fast decisions and they don’t second guess themselves. Some people seem to have a mystical ability to make a split second decision and hold their ground with absolute unbreakable tenacity. Speed and confidence of decision making are the make and break factors for every business.
Plenty of people try to hide their indecisiveness by pretending to be decisive. Have you ever met somebody who said they were absolutely committed to a decision with no doubt whatsoever, only to watch them make a U-turn a week later? You can’t fake decisiveness. The truly decisive manager is the one who stays the course.
Bad Meetings Are The Root Cause
How you run meetings says everything about your company and your decision making process. I have come to believe that meeting culture could possibly be the single factor that separates successful companies from unsuccessful ones. Great companies have great meetings. Bad companies have bad meetings. I think it’s not so much a question of how to design and run a meeting but a question of “why are we having this meeting?”
If you want to learn how to run a good meeting, the easiest place to start is by looking at specific examples of how to run bad meetings. If you want to learn how to create a terrible company, try any of these meeting structures today!
The Shaming Session
A typical use of a standing weekly team meeting is to publicly corner or “call out” the coworkers who have been ignoring your emails all week, or to put someone in their place. These highly dysfunctional meetings are often accompanied by “recap” emails that twist what was said and conveniently omit key details.
The Status Quo Checkbox Meeting
This is the kind of meeting that could have been an email. Everybody is disengaged and checked out. People are looking at their phones or stepping out to make other calls. When somebody skips the meeting, nobody really cares because everyone knows the meeting is a waste of time anyway. The only reason the meeting even happens at all is… wait, does anyone remember? Sometimes the status quo checkbox meeting is mandated by upper management and none of the attendees have any desire to be there.
The Everything-And-The-Kitchen-Sink Meeting
This is the type of meeting with too many attendees that drags on and attempts to cover every issue. The scope of the meeting is ridiculously overgrown and poorly defined. If there’s even an agenda at all, it’s either five pages long or so vague as to be useless. I remember sitting in on one of these meetings years ago. The organizer said he thought we should include everyone who might need to weigh in. The meeting went on for most of the day and it was a circus of sidebars. I’m not sure a single thing actually got accomplished.
The Theatrical Decision Meeting
As the name implies, this is a meeting that was just for show. In a theatrical meeting, people pretend to seek out input for the purpose of making a decision. The truth is, the decision is already made and it’s already a done deal. I think bosses do this to try to get people’s buy-in and make them feel like they had input into a decision. Unfortunately, the tactic is usually pretty obvious and everyone sees right through it. Anyone who dares tell the truth or challenge the decision will end up with targets on their backs.
The Smokescreen Meeting
This is the meeting that exists solely to avoid making progress and serves as a stall for time. There aren’t any action items, but plenty of “what ifs” and “reviews” of open items. This meeting sounds like a broken record. The attendees wonder if they are just listening to a recording of the last meeting because nothing has changed. Smokescreen meetings are organized to create the illusion of progress (or conjure up excuses for the lack of progress). Nothing’s been done, but we had another meeting! Same time next week?
Accountability
A clear purpose is critical, but accountability is what puts teeth behind purpose. In a strong meeting, everyone has an outcome to drive for. Everyone has follow-up actions to report on. Everybody owns something. Successful companies have a culture of accountability. These are the companies who are quickest to act on opportunity, because everyone has a vested interest in looking for opportunity.
Bad meetings are more expensive than office space, payroll, supplies, insurance, advertising, and the rest of the P&L combined. The real cost of bad meetings is the million-dollar decisions that never get made.
