Photo Credits: LeeBrimelow

Some time ago I talked about three common Internet marketing time wasters. Most office workers, however, seem to agree that the biggest time waster in business is found in the offline world: meetings.

After almost twenty years in the corporate world, I’ve been thinking long and hard about why most meetings don’t work. Here is my stab at the most common reasons:

1. A meeting is called just to present facts

People gather around a table to watch the presenter show slide after slide of tables, graphs and assorted data. If the only purpose of the meeting is to share data there is really no need to meet. It is enough to send the participants the document as an email attachment.

2. Meeting are too long and costly

I have yet to attend a meeting that is too short. More often than not, meetings run well beyond their alloted time. With better planning meetings can always be made shorter. If companies were required to calculate the cost of having a meeting beforehand, most meetings would not even be called.

3. Not everybody is cut out to do presentations

While speaking in public can certainly be learned , some people just hate to speak in front of others . They usually resort to mechanically reading the slides, while participants disengage and the quality of the meeting deteriorates.

While some people within an organization can be excused for not having the confidence level or the habit of speaking publicly, top executives (and especially marketing and sales professionals) should be able to give good, engaging presentations.

As they say, “there is no such thing as a boring subject, only boring speakers”.

4. Slides sometimes stand in the way of effective communication

The use of PowerPoint slides is so widespread that it has become the default presentation format.

Unless the presentation is truly engaging, the presenter and the audience end up spending more time staring at the screen than making eye contact, asking and answering questions, and reading non-verbal cues like body posture that may give a clear indication of how well the meeting is going.

Sometimes I believe that meetings would go better if the presenter would just turn off the projector, sit at the edge of a table, and have the courage to completely change the pace by saying something like: “OK guys, let’s do this a little differently: what are the three things you would like to get out of this meeting?”.

5. The quality of a meeting is inversely proportional to the number of attendees

There are usually too many people in any given meeting. Some people believe that the more people are invited, the more important the meeting. In other occasions, people are just invited out of courtesy, or out of laziness and lack of planning (let’s invite everybody, ‘just in case’).

6. Some participants tend to go out on a limb

Our country is obsessed with political correctness. When it comes to meetings, we’ve been conditioned to believe that everybody’s opinion is important, that all feedback is positive, and that there are no stupid questions.

Unfortunately, some people are not qualified to give an opinion, feedback can be irrelevant to the subject matter being discussed, and yes, there are stupid questions.

This article in 37signals puts it more eloquently: “[meetings] often contain at least one moron that inevitably get his turn to waste everyone’s time with nonsense”.

7. The subject of the meeting is irrelevant to the audience

This happens often in conference calls and sales meetings. Usually, an employee belonging to a certain sales region or function is required to present his part, while employees from a different region or function sit by waiting for their turn to speak.

This kind of meeting can be easily replaced by a series of one-on-one reviews between the presenters and their supervisors and/or other interested parties.

Most articles I’ve read about meetings focus on how to make a meeting more productive (have an agenda, keep track of time, draft and distribute minutes, etc.). While those things are important, the question that needs to be answered first is: Is this meeting really necessary?

In other words, before we worry about making a meeting efficient, we need to decide if having a meeting is the most effective way to achieve the desired outcome.

IMHO, there are only three valid reasons to have a meeting:

a) To brainstorm
b) To make a decision
c) To sell an idea to a group of people

If what we want to accomplish doesn’t fall into at least one of these three buckets, there is likely no reason to have a meeting.

To finish, I’ll let you watch this really funny video, that touches on some of the topics discussed in this post:

How To Avoid Meetings That Suck - Celebrity bloopers here

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