In Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable…About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business, Patrick Lencioni tackles the common issue of ineffective corporate meetings. Told in the form of a leadership “fable”, the book offers more story than insight. This summary provides an overview Lencioni’s key points as well as my thoughts on the book.
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You may also want to check out:
- Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber
- Power: Why Some People Have It—And Others Don’t by Jeffrey Pfeffer
- Why you have so many unnecessary or ineffective meetings
Key Takeaways from Death by Meeting
- There’s no reason why meetings — even long ones — need to be boring or painful. Meetings focus on important issues impacting our lives, so in theory should be more interesting than a long movie.
- The two main problems that make meetings boring and ineffective are:
- Lack of conflict. When people are afraid to voice disagreement in a meeting, it ends up being boring. The meeting is also ineffective because that unvoiced disagreement manifests in other ways later.
- Mixed purposes. Leaders often make the mistake of trying to get the meeting “over with” by cramming everything into a single meeting.
- The solutions to these two problems are, respectively:
- Mine for and encourage conflict.
- Have different meetings for different purposes. Lencioni suggests that teams should have a Daily Check-In, Weekly Tactical, Monthly Strategic, and Quarterly Off-Site Review.
- It’s a myth that the problem with meetings is that there are too many of them or that they are too long. While it’s true that most meetings are a waste of time, when used properly they can actually save time.
Detailed Summary of Death by Meeting
The fable
Most of it is told in the form of a short(ish) story about some terrible executive-level meetings at a golf game company, Yip.
Yip holds weekly executive meetings, which are consistently awful and unproductive. Its CEO, Casey, is under pressure to make the meetings better or risk getting fired. Luckily, his extremely overqualified intern, Will, is invested in helping him and tries various things to improve the meetings.
To no one’s surprise, the meetings do get better and Casey keeps his job.
Problem #1: Lack of Conflict
Lencioni outlines two reasons why most meetings suck. The first is a lack of conflict.
People often think that meetings are boring because they’re long. However, most movies are just as long but people don’t find them boring, because movies involve conflict. Moreover, meetings are interactive and directly relevant to our lives in a way that movies are not. So, if anything, meetings should be more engaging than movies.
To make meetings more engaging and effective, leaders should:
- Give people a “hook”. You need to give people a reason to care in the first 10 minutes — they must know what is at stake. [See also Matthew Dicks’ discussion of “stakes” in Storyworthy.] For example, say you have a meeting about controlling expenses. Instead of starting by saying that the company has exceeded some arbitrary budget, emphasise why spending too much matters.
- Mine for conflict. Leaders should seek out any important issues where team members may disagree. If members don’t want to engage in those discussions, the leader should force them to, even if it makes the leader temporarily unpopular.
- Give people permissions to voice disagreement. When team members start to engage in debate, it can be uncomfortable. A leader should encourage them and explicitly remind them that what they’re doing is good (even if comes off a bit paternalistic).
Problem #2: Mixed purposes
In a bid to minimise wasted time, leaders may throw all issues that need to be discussed into a single meeting, creating a “meeting stew” full of random ingredients. They do this in the mistaken belief that the problem is too many meetings.
Lencioni disagrees — meeting stews just end up being ineffective and unsatisfying for everyone. While it’s true that we waste a lot of time in meetings, that’s because we’re doing them wrong. When properly deployed, meetings can be save time by reducing time spent calling and roaming around to clarify issues. Instead of having a general “meeting stew”, there should be different meetings of different lengths for different purposes.
Death by Meeting outlines four basic types of meetings:
- Daily Check-In
- Weekly (or Fortnightly) Tactical
- Monthly (or Ad Hoc) Strategic
- Quarterly Off-Site Review
Daily Check-In (5 mins)
This should just be a quick standing meeting or “huddle”, where team members report on their activities that day. The purpose is to make sure nothing falls through the cracks and people don’t step on each other’s toes.
A common challenge is getting people to stick with it. To embed this in people’s routines, keep the meetings at the same time and location, and make sure you don’t cancel even if only two team members are in the office on a given day. Members will often lobby to abandon this before they’ve given it a fair chance, but teams should commit to trying it for a set period (e.g. 2 months) before evaluating whether it’s working.
Another related issue is keeping the check-in to 5 minutes — if the daily check-in gets too long, people will quickly tire of it. Be firm in making sure team members don’t try to discuss issues that should be discussed in the Weekly Tactical. One way to mitigate this is to keep people standing during these meetings.
Weekly (or Fortnightly) Tactical (45-90 mins)
This meeting should focus exclusively on tactical issues of immediate concern, and should occur regularly.
Lencioni recommends that this meeting contain three critical elements:
- A lightning round, where everyone indicates their 2-3 priorities for the week. When members get into too much detail here, others lose interest, so each person should keep to 1 minute or less. Even for a large team, this should take no more than 10 minutes.
- The progress review, where members routinely review critical metrics such as revenue, expenses, customer satisfaction, etc. This should take no more than 5 minutes. Quick questions for clarification are okay, but not lengthy discussion of underlying issues.
- A real-time agenda. Here you discuss tactical issues that must be addressed in the short-term, such as whether to increase advertising this month or whether hiring should be frozen. Unusually, Lencioni does not advocate setting an agenda in advance. He argues that you can’t predict the organisation’s priorities before you know what people are actually working on and how the company is performing against its goals, and the agenda should be based on those.
The biggest challenge here is the temptation to dive into long-term strategic issues. However, important, complex topics need more time than is available in the tactical meetings and may even require preparation. Moreover, it’s hard for people to mentally switch between topics of different magnitude.
Monthly (or Ad Hoc) Strategic (at least 2 hours)
The Monthly Strategic allows executives to focus on the important over the urgent. It is the most interesting and possibly important meeting any team has. During this meeting, executives can debate, analyse and wrestle with critical issues without fear of conflict, and without being distracted by short-term concerns.
The meeting length will vary depending on the topics covered but Lencioni recommends setting at least 2 hours per topic so that there’s enough time for open-ended debate. Too many issues on the agenda just dilutes the quality of the debate around the most critical issues.
The leader should hold participants accountable for doing enough research and preparation ahead of time. Otherwise, people tend to default to anecdotal decision-making instead of engaging in high-quality discussion.
An obvious challenge in implementing these meetings is scheduling enough time, given how busy executives’ schedules are. But it’s crucial to be disciplined about this, even if it means people have to stay later or clear their day. If they do clear their day, they’re almost always glad that they did, and usually find they didn’t really miss anything important — just tactical and admin matters.
Strategic meetings should take place regularly so that people remember to have strategic conversations. They also help keep Weekly Tacticals from getting derailed. If a strategic issue comes up that can’t wait for the next monthly meeting, you can set up an Ad Hoc Strategic — don’t try to address it in the Weekly Tactical.
Quarterly Off-Site Review
An effective off-site allows executives to consider their businesses in a more holistic, long-term way. The review should focus on topics like: comprehensive strategy, team, personnel, and competitive context/industry. The off-site should not be overly structured or crammed full of lengthy informational sessions or slide presentations, but should give executives a chance to reflect on the state of the organisation.
Off-sites have a (deserved) reputation for being a touchy-feely waste of time, but Lencioni believes that being away from the office helps eliminate distractions. However, going to a conference centre or hotel is enough. The purpose isn’t to entertain. An off-site at an exotic location or with excessive social activities just substitutes one distraction (the office) for another.
Inviting outsiders to the off-sites is also usually a mistake, because it changes the team dynamic. The only exception is perhaps an outside facilitator, who understands the organisation’s business and is trusted by the team. Such a facilitator allows the team leader to participate fully in discussions without worrying about facilitation.
My Thoughts
While Death by Meeting was a very short and easy read, this is because it’s pretty light on material. The key points are set out in a dozen or so pages towards the end. The “fable” is Lencioni’s signature — he’s employed it in many other books, and seems to be his way of stretching a few pages of material into over 200 pages. Alternatively, it’s a way of tricking people who hate non-fiction into reading non-fiction. Based on other people’s reviews, it seems to work, but that’s certainly not me.
The two problems Lencioni identified undoubtedly exist, but the book barely skimmed the surface. There are way more problems with meetings beyond the two he described, as I’ve written in a separate post. Unfortunately, Lencioni did not explain how to work out if a meeting is required or how to manage a conflict once you’ve found it. I also wish he’d given more practical guidance and examples. For example, distinguishing between tactical and strategic issues seems crucial, yet he doesn’t explain how to do this.
I did wonder if Lencioni was holding back the good stuff so that you have to engage his consulting firm or buy one of his 12 other (also very thin) books. Perhaps he should write a book on sales and marketing instead.
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What do you think of my summary of Death by Meeting? Do the problems raised by Lencioni ring true for you? Share your thoughts in the comments below!