Comstock's magazine 0919 - September 2019 | Page 55

aro, who owns Lisa Montanaro Global Enterprises. She also says
managers call meetings because they think we’ve always done it
this way. We have lots of meetings because we’re used to having
lots of meetings, and it can take guts to buck the status quo.
Meetings breed meetings too. A 2014 study by Michael
Mankins, a partner at Bain & Company, found that at one large
company, the weekly senior executive status meeting — just
once a week! — required 300,000 annual hours of work (more
than 5,000 hours per week). Senior directors met to prepare for
the executives, junior directors met to prepare for the senior di-
rectors, managers scrambled to prep for the directors, the un-
derlings hustled to make slides and spreadsheets — the Dilbert
cartoon writes itself.
These meetings can cause burnout. We’re all busy. “Peo-
ple are stressed about all the work they didn’t get done — and
that still needs to get done — because they were in a day of
meetings,” says Elsbach. It’s not that meetings get in the way
of leisure; meetings get in the way of work. “There’s almost a
resentment,” says Montanaro. “People are thinking, ‘I could be
chiseling away at my to-do list.’” That frustration is acute when
meetings feel pointless, veer off-topic, get nothing done and are
dominated by the conversation hogs. Middle managers have it
particularly rough; McBride says they’re pulled in two direc-
tions — meetings from the top and meetings from the bottom
— and her clients grumble that there’s “a lot of discussion but
no decision.”
There are countless ways to upgrade meetings, but they can
be clumped into one of two buckets: the structure of meetings
(the when, the where, the who) and the internal dynamics of the
meeting itself (the why, the how).
“People are stressed
about all the work
they didn’t get done
— and that still needs
to get done — because
they were in a day of
meetings.”
Kimberly Elsbach, professor of management, UC Davis
THE STRUCTURE OF MEETINGS
The When
Thanks to habit, custom and, more realistically, the default
settings of Outlook, we schedule meetings for an hour or 30
minutes. But does that make sense? Logically, what are the
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