Our professional lives revolve around meetings.
Yet, how many of these gatherings actually serve a purpose beyond mundane check-ins or simple status updates that could have been delivered via email?
Time is more valuable than ever, and it’s imperative to reconsider both whether and how we spend our time in meetings.
One path towards better meetings begins by acknowledging that if your meeting doesn’t start with a question, perhaps it’s better left unscheduled.
And if you have to hold a meeting, there are excellent reasons to start yours by asking a question as we’ll explore below.
The Problem with Ineffective Meetings
The numbers are startling.
According to a study by Atlassian, employees on average attend 62 meetings a month, with half of them being considered a waste of time. This translates to a staggering 31 hours spent in unproductive meetings each month, per employee. When extrapolated over an entire year for a company with hundreds or thousands of employees, the financial implications are immense.
In short, the way we hold our meetings cost U.S. businesses billions annually in lost productivity.
The problem with how we manage our meetings isn’t confined to mere monetary losses. Ineffective meetings can be a significant drain on employee morale.
A recent article on Harvard Business Review shows how 92% of employees consider meetings costly and unproductive. Such sentiments, if left to fester, can lead to feelings of frustration and stagnation, wreaking havoc on your corporate structures. Over time, this not only erodes the motivation of employees but also affects their mental well-being, increasing the risk of burnout.
The upshot is that the authors found that reducing meetings by 40% increases employee productivity by 71%. Fewer employees also reported feelings of micromanagement and people felt more valued, trusted, and more engaged across the board as the number of meetings was reduced.
Clearly, the solution to ineffective meetings is to think carefully about when and whether to hold them.
The key to knowing if your meeting should be scheduled is being clear about what question you are seeking an answer to?
The Power of Starting with a Question
The true value of a meeting is its ability to harness collective intelligence in real time.
Meetings should tackle challenges that emails, reports, or asynchronous tools can’t address. Effective meetings are a platform for collective brainstorming, where the dynamic exchange of ideas is essential to coming up with the right solutions.
As Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman expounded in “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, the way an issue is presented can drastically alter the way we perceive and address it.
By starting the meeting with the central question the group is solving for, we frame the session as a quest for answers, tapping into our innate desire for resolution, driving engagement and focus.
In addition, starting a meeting with a question establishes a clear frame, ensuring that participants are aligned in their understanding and objectives.
Start Framing Your Meetings With The Right Questions
Before sending out your next calendar invite, ask yourself the following question: Do I have a clearly defined problem that I need the group’s help to solve?
If not, you are better off going to the drawing board and reconsidering your approach entirely.
If you do, your next task is to come up with an effective question that you can frame your meeting with.
Aim for questions that are specific enough to drive the conversation while also being sufficiently open-ended so that you do not inadvertently dictate the results by asking it.
For example, instead of calling your team together to “discuss production bottlenecks” add the following to the top of your calendar invite: “Where are our biggest bottlenecks in the current workflow, and how can we streamline processes to save both time and costs?“
By starting each meeting with the right question, you transform your sessions to active problem-solving arenas where every attendee becomes a stakeholder in the answer.
This subtle shift from statement-driven to question-led meetings can be the catalyst that drives innovation, fosters collective intelligence, and elevates the overall efficacy of your gatherings. It’s time to redefine leadership in meetings by leading with questions.
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