In a few hours, you will be starting your weekly round of 'good-finding', solution-focused, appreciative meetings; you will programme some quiet time for reflection and planning and look forward to recognising the contributions of others towards your success. Your meetings will run well, crisply chaired with collaborative outcomes (well, I hope so anyway).
On the other hand, your week might pan out a little differently. In one sample of 65 CEOs reported by the Wall Street Journal and cited by the Drucker Exchange, executives spent roughly 18 hours of a 55-hour workweek in meetings, more than three hours on calls and five hours in business meals (!), on average, the Journal noted. “Working alone averaged just six hours weekly.”
The Drucker Exchange website also reported that he found meetings to be big potential time-wasters. He also knew that they didn’t have to be that way. The key to successful meetings, in Drucker’s eyes, was to make sure that they became “work sessions rather than bull sessions.”
In The Effective Executive, Drucker put meetings into the following categories, and also offered some specific operating instructions for each:
- “A meeting to prepare a statement, an announcement, or a press release. For this to be productive, one member has to prepare a draft beforehand.” So, no statements created by committee, at least not from scratch.
- “A meeting to make an announcement—for example, an organisational change. This meeting should be confined to the announcement and a discussion about it.” Limiting the scope to ensure the message is clear and can be properly conveyed outside of the meeting need not limit the necessary debate and consultation, rather it ensures they happen with the key message crystal clear.
- “A meeting in which one member reports. Nothing but the report should be discussed.” We know what happens when these single-issue meetings broaden out to include "just another issue", don't we?
- “A meeting in which several or all members report. Either there should be no discussion at all or the discussion should be limited to questions for clarification.” That's a tough one. yet, how often have these sessions burned hours of time unnecessarily, particularly if clarification becomes debate which turns into arguments of position-taking?
- “A meeting to inform the convening executive. The executive should listen and ask questions.”
- “A meeting whose only function is to allow the participants to be in the executive’s presence. . . . .There is no way to make these meetings productive. They are the penalties of rank.”
From there, good executives “sum up and adjourn”—and then they follow up. Alfred Sloan of General Motors always wrote up a summary of the main points and the conclusions reached at a meeting and sent a copy to everyone who’d been present. Said Drucker: “It was through these memos—each a small masterpiece—that Sloan made himself into an outstandingly effective executive.”
Some of the items in the list might appear to be rather strict, dogmatic even - perhaps they were intended that way, to challenge current practice and generate a shift of behaviour. Whether dogmatic or simply properly challenging, Drucker's views are food for thought at a time when we so many colleagues have so much to do with so little resource - the most precious of which is time!
Have an achieving week.
