Four Signs That It May Be Time To Ban Your Meetings

And why that might not be necessary

Shopify began its meeting ban experiment this past January. Since then, I've gotten many questions from clients and others, including HR leaders, about whether they should jump on the "meetings bandwagon." Here's how I see it:

You should absolutely stop wasting your people's valuable time with useless meetings. But eliminating meetings may not always be the way to go. 

There are four primary reasons for having most meetings, and if your sessions are not addressing any of these, it may be time for a change. Here are the four reasons:

1. To learn and expand what you see, think, and understand
This happens when people share (and listen well) what they're each seeing and how they're interpreting things. Every person and team has blind spots, and it's impossible to navigate the complexities and challenges of today's business environment alone, no matter how smart, perceptive, or experienced any team member may be. If you want to perform well together, you've got to get good at learning together. 

2. To make important decisions and design or solve significant problems
Not all decisions are equally important, and even important ones don't all impact everybody equally. Same with problems. Some decisions can be made without a meeting and don't need everybody's full engagement to implement. And some issues can be declared or solved without convening everybody on the team. Making decisions and solving problems together can remind team members and others about what's important to pay attention to, how to think about things, and what to commit to. You can ask yourself, is gaining an extra 30-60 minutes a week by not meeting worth losing this clarity? Sometimes it may be worth it, and sometimes not. 

3. To make and manage the promises that deliver value to customers (and to everyone in the organization who makes that happen). These promises—and how they're managed—drive execution and clear accountability in a team.

These reasons reflect the three main types of conversations—Learning Conversations, Design Conversations, and Fulfillment Conversations—that are central to outstanding collaborative performance in organizations. When your meetings include one or more of these three conversations, and the conversations are managed well, then folks will almost always leave the meetings more grounded, energized, and better prepared to perform well than they arrived. 

4. This reason for the meeting is also critical: It's to keep the team or group connected and engaged with each other and with their collective vision and mission. Though no less important than the other three reasons, if your meetings are well-designed and the conversations well-managed, this will also be addressed. 

Before deciding to perform last rites on a recurring meeting, ask yourself if this meeting delivers the goods: Are people really learning and expanding their thinking? Are important decisions being made and good problems being raised and addressed? Are valuable promises being made and managed in ways that fulfill the mission of the team and organization? 

If not, you can conduct your own experiment by discontinuing the meeting and seeing what happens: If people are happier and performance doesn't suffer, then the meeting may have just been a vestige of a bygone era, and you could be better off without it. 

If you feel something important has been lost, however, consider upgrading your meetings instead of ending them. You can start by clarifying their purpose, ensuring that only necessary attendees are invited, and then get help to step up your meeting design and conversational facilitation skills. 

Banning specific meetings could be the right thing for your team and organization. But many other meetings can be transformed—from an energy-sapping, necessary evil to valuable and enlivening encounters that people look forward to because they help them to do their best work. 

Resources:

• Book: Full Contact Performance: The Internal Art of Organizational Collaboration By Grayson James, with a foreword by Dr. Marshall Goldsmith. John Hunt Publishing (Business Books imprint). To be released August, 2023. Available for pre-order at: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Indiebooks.
• Article: Shopify deleted 322,000 hours of meetings. Should the rest of us be jealous?  
• Blog Post: Trash your meeting agenda (and have a good conversation). 

Grayson James is a certified ontological coach and author of Full Contact Performance: The Internal Art of Organizational Collaboration.