Episode 53 - Design Meetings to Maximize Outcomes

Rebecca Hines (0:01)

There are a few things that can demonstrate your leadership, regardless of your formal title, more than being able to design a good meeting or steer a bad one back on track. Because if someone can't run a meeting, it doesn't give a lot of confidence that they can run anything bigger effectively.

SPEAKER_2 (0:21)

What happens when you delete every meeting on your calendar and only bring back those that earn their place? In our bestselling book, Your Best Meeting Ever, Seven Principles for Designing Meetings That Get Things Done, Rebecca Hines offers a bold blueprint for changing routine meetings into engaging products that drive decisions, respect participants' time and energy, and integrate seamlessly into an organization's communications. Dr. Hines brings a powerhouse blend of research, innovation, and real world impact to our discussion on meetings. She earned a PhD in management science and engineering from Stanford University, and has founded two influential research institutes dedicated to transforming the future of work, Asana's Work Innovation Lab, and Glean's Work AI Institute.

Hines is an advisor for the remote work and the Doodle Time Institutes, and is an instructor for the CNBC Make It course, How to Use AI to Be More Successful at Work. Her insights appear in top publications, including Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Time. And she's advised leaders at global organizations like Amazon, Microsoft, Deloitte, and IBM.

Now let's hand things over to our host, Lori Murphy, Assistant Division Director for Executive Education at the Federal Judicial Center. Lori, take it away.

Lori Murphy (1:52)

Well, Rebecca, welcome. We're so glad to have you today.

Rebecca Hines (1:54)

Thank you so much for having me.

Lori Murphy (1:56)

Rebecca, I was surprised to learn from your book that today's meeting habits have roots in wartime sabotage manuals. Would you walk us through that origin story and how it still shapes how we meet today?

Rebecca Hines (2:08)

I start your best meeting ever with the story of what is called the simple sabotage field manual. And this was a manual written in World War II era. It was written by the precursor to the CIA. And in the pages of this manual are various acts of sabotage. And they're designed for ordinary citizens living in enemy territory as to disrupt the enemy from within. And one of those tactics is meetings. Deploy meetings that are long-winded, that are inefficient, do everything through channels.

The fact that we often deploy these tools once weaponized as acts of sabotage, I think it puts it in perspective just how broken our meeting culture is. We are now flooded with new technologies and new capabilities, and yet this practice that we continue to rely on for so much of our work, it looks largely the same as it did decades ago.

Lori Murphy (3:11)

The amount of time in meetings has more than doubled since the 1960s. What's this really costing us, organizationally and personally?

Rebecca Hines (3:22)

At every level, it's costing us. When we think about executive spending now 23 hours per week in meetings, more or less three work days, think about the opportunity cost of that time, and the cost of dysfunctional meetings goes beyond the business results. How we feel about our meetings is a significant predictor of how we feel about our overall job satisfaction. My colleagues and I have done research on what we call meeting hangovers, which I think we've all felt. We leave the meeting, but the meeting doesn't leave us. As my colleague Bob Sutton will put it, we often use meetings as a lazy substitute for real work and smart thinking. And I think that is one of the biggest hidden costs, the fact that we so easily deploy these tools when we would be better off taking five minutes, ten minutes to decide whether this really deserves a meeting, or whether we can handle the problem asynchronously or independently.

Lori Murphy (4:26)

What does the research say about how workers feel about the current meeting landscape?

Rebecca Hines (4:30)

Most workers say that good proportion of their meetings could be eliminated without any negative consequences. And there's this sense that this is an inevitable cost of doing business. We just have to put up with bad meetings, because that's the reality of our organizations. And I think all of these things are big misconceptions. They're very natural consumptions, they're very rational conceptions, but they're very dangerous conceptions, because we know that great meetings are possible, and there are a few things better than a great meeting, but it does take intentional design.

Lori Murphy (5:09)

What are the cues that a meeting didn't land well, didn't go as expected?