Pointless Meetings…

Just received Douglas Reeves’ new book, The Learning Leader: How to Focus School Improvement for Better Results, and haven’t had time to read it yet — but in skimming through it, this passage caught my attention…

Excuse yourself from pointless meetings. Ask yourself this: Do you know, within the first 5 or 10 minutes of most meetings, whether there is a clear objective, whether everyone will make a meaningful contribution, and whether there is a high probability that the meeting will achieve its objectives? If you answer yes, as most leaders do, then the difference between the 5th minute of a pointless and unproductive meeting and the 60th minute at which it was mercifully adjourned is a personal choice in favor of wasted time. When the moment of your maximum contribution has arrived and departed, pose this question to the group: “Is there anything else I can contribute to this meeting?” In an astonishing number of cases, the honest responses are “No,” “We don’t know,” or “We just wanted to share this information with you.” The best response to the latter claim is to politely but unequivocally say “We have a standard for meetings, and it’s that they are used only to gain the collective wisdom of a group to make better decisions. We never use meetings for announcements or sharing information, and if that is what you have in mind, please give it to me in an e-mail or voice mail. If I can’t contribute anything more to a better decision right now, then I need to excuse myself.”

However harsh this may seem, taking such a stance will not only save hundreds of precious leadership hours — gems that evaporate at the end of every day — but also set an example for people throughout the organization who now regard a day devoted to attendance at meetings as productive. Unproductive meetings don’t contribute to better decisions, but they become antagonistic when colleagues protect turf, represent their vested interests, or otherwise engage in the illusion of productivity…

The most important reason to get up and leave meetings is that every hour you are in a pointless meeting is an hour that is not devoted to mentoring and nurturing the “hubs” — those leaders and other members of your organization who have profound systemwide impact. Appreciation, recognition, and personal contact are some of the most extraordinarily strategic uses of leadership time, yet time is rarely allocated in that way because we are too busy with expenditures of time that are distinguished only by tradition and expectation, not by effectiveness.

The first part of this passage reminds me of one of the “7 Disciplines for strengthening instruction” (Tony Wagner, Ed Week, Nov. 12, 2003):

All adult meetings are about instruction and are models of good teaching.

I don’t even want to try to calculate the number of hours this year that I have been subjected to wasted time in meetings where the only point is to disseminate information that could easily be distributed via email. I would guess that it’s pretty close to 95% of the meeting time from this past year.

I think the only thing that aggravates me more than this, are the meetings where school leaders DO ask teachers for their input and then ignore the input during decision-making. This kind of behavior is just as bad as not allowing the teachers to provide any input.

This is one change that needs to start at the top. Teachers are not empowered to tell their supervisor that “this meeting is a waste of my time”, and I doubt many principals would be willing to say this to their superintendent. District and school administrators must begin to have this unwavering expectation about ALL meetings — and model the behavior by not scheduling any more “pointless meetings”.

Change Agency by Stephanie Sandifer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. You may copy, distribute, transmit and/or remix this content for noncommercial uses as long as you attribute the work to Stephanie Sandifer (with link back to the original post) and agree to license the work under the same or similar license.