Patrick Lencioni is a bestselling author and management consultant. Death by Meeting is a good book that can help anyone who has managerial responsibility. The control of meetings and the participation of team members is essential for the growth of the company.
Why is this important to me?
I understand that you are going to spend the next 8 minutes of your life watching this video, so it must be important and relevant. Everyone has been to bad meetings and I’ve led some of them myself. Bad meetings cost companies a lot of money. If you have a 1 hour meeting with 10 people in the room and you don’t come out with clear misleading action steps then you wasted a lot of time and money.
Human time and energy are critical parts of a company’s intellectual property. Lost time equals wasted profit. Having bad meetings is disconnecting and demotivating.
Death by Meeting covers several points. All of them are worth the time to study. For the sake of time, I will outline three areas and answer what, why, and how for each.
1. Movies and meetings: Meetings should be interactive and full of conflict. Conflict happens every day between competitors, team members, customers, and departments. Getting to the heart of the conflict and taking decisive action for growth is required. Every great movie has a conflict and every reunion should too. Also, people pay attention to the narrative. This is important to keep the attention of the meeting members. Well organized meetings should be better than movies because they are interactive and directly affect your life at work.
2. Tactical Meetings: Weekly meetings are important and should be 45 minutes to an hour in length. These meetings should be a review of each person’s weekly activities and scorecard. A quick summary of the week and anything immediate that needs to be addressed should be addressed. If a strategic issue comes up, it should be noted but not discussed at this meeting. Also, if there are any issues that team members need help with, that needs to be covered as well.
3. Strategy meetings: monthly strategy meetings usually last two hours. These meetings cover strategic issues and require analysis, discussion and deciding on a course of action. If it’s a sales meeting, the topics covered would be executing the value proposition, competitive strategy, acquiring key target accounts, etc. There has to be conflict in these meetings and in the end, once a course of action is agreed upon, everyone has to support the decision. This is especially important if you disagree with the course of action. That is why it is so important to argue constructively. If a strategic course of action just gets stuck in your throat without hearing all the ideas, then the initiative will die. Remember that it is the team members who execute the tactics behind the strategy and if they cannot make your point, they will not support your actions.
Death by Meeting is a good book. If followed, it has the potential to transform your unproductive meetings into company-changing events.
I hope you have found this brief summary useful. The key to any new idea is to work it into your daily routine until it becomes a habit. Habits are formed in as little as 21 days. One thing you can take away from this book is mine for the conflict. Ask good questions and dig to uncover the real issues in meetings. If there’s a big elephant in the room and no one is touching it, ask questions and address the problem directly.
