Meetings and Decision Making

Today in our team retrospective, one of our team's summer interns mentioned that the team seems to struggle with making decisions. This sparked a healthy discussion on why it seems that way and what, if anything, can be done about it. As I thought about that question, some tips about meetings came to my mind that I wanted to offer to this intern and to the others on my team. At first I just thought I had one or two short thoughts to share, but the list quickly got bigger, so I decided to write a blog post about it. These are things I've observed in my professional career so far. Some of these I've learned along the way, others I've adopted from articles or books I've read. Hopefully these thoughts are useful to you as well.

Don't Attend Meetings You're Not Needed In

The first suggestion that came to my mind is to not attend meetings you're not needed in. If you have a meeting on your calendar and you're not sure exactly how you'll contribute to it or your skeptical that it's worth your time, reach out to the meeting organizer and express your concerns. Ask if there's a specific reason why they need you to attend that meeting. If there's no compelling reason to attend, don't. This will not only free your time but likely make the meeting easier to manage for the person running it.

Only A Few Meetings Are Really Required

This point varies a lot from company to company and from position to position, but the main idea here is that you probably have a few meetings that you aren't required to attend but that you attend anyway. Some of these you might be personally interested in and that's great. I'd encourage you to attend those as often as you are able. Others, though, you might be attending because you think you need to, but in reality, you don't need to. If you think about it, you can probably identify a handful of meetings a week that you are required to attend (maybe even fewer). All the others are meetings you could miss if you needed to.

For example, the company I work for follows the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). In SAFe, we practice Scrum at the team level. So, as a team, we're required to attend our Sprint Planning Meeting every two weeks, our demo every two weeks, an Agility Health Assessment every 3 months, and Program Increment Planning every 3 months. Other than that, there aren't really any meetings that are required. There may be some ad-hoc meetings that are pretty important or some meetings that you're interested in, but most of these aren't required and could easily be skipped.

Some Meetings Can Be Emails

While I was discussing this with my team, there were some suggestions to hold a meeting to get people familiar with a topic so they can be prepared for the meeting when we discuss and decide on a topic. If that first meeting is extremely short, then it could be okay, but I think the same could be accomplished either in an email or in the team's chat/Slack channel. If you can accomplish the same objective over an email or a chat, that option should be preferred. Meetings are interruptions to work and can be costly even if they're short. If you have something that can be done in an email or chat, do it there first. If further discussion is warranted, then consider holding a meeting.

Group Decision Making is Hard

Making decisions in a group can get rather complicated. As the group size increases, the ability to reach a unanimous decision decreases. Sometimes it can seem that even with a handful of people you can never reach a unanimous decision. Making decisions in a group is hard. It takes a lot of communication, learning, teaching, patience, and empathy. If you have have those attributes and the necessary time, you can meet a unanimous decision eventually no matter the size of the group. But in the real world, we often don't have that kind of time. So you have to take shortcuts. Sometimes that means delaying a decision. Sometimes that means putting it to a vote or assigning it out to a smaller group. There are a number of tactics to use, but the main lesson here is making decisions with a group will take longer and be more difficult than you think. Be patient. Don't expect a decision to be made in every meeting. Another lesson to learn here is, if you need a group, you may try other strategies for reaching a decision that your normal, go-to strategies.

Be a Better Facilitator

Towards the end of our discussion as a team, I slowly started to realize that the effectiveness of the meeting is the responsibility of the one facilitating the meeting. If no decision is reached or there's no clear action at the end of the meeting, it's usually a failure of the facilitator. As someone who has facilitated a lot of meetings, that can be a hard statement to swallow, but I do think it's true. The job of the facilitator is to keep the meeting focused and on-track. If the meeting isn't moving towards the goal, it's the facilitator's job to identify that and do something to get it back on-track. There are times that meetings don't go as planned and you seem to know less coming out of them than when you went in. That situation isn't the facilitators fault. But if the problem is known and there are solutions available and the group is unable to reach a decision, the facilitator is at least partly to blame. So, if you want more effective meetings and you're the one facilitating them, try to do a better job of keeping the meeting on-track and of focusing on the goals (while still being empathetic to the attendees).

Meetings Aren't About You

Whether you're the facilitator or a participant, most meetings aren't about you (1-on-1's being an obvious exception). When you're meeting together as a team or group, it's no longer about you and your agenda, it's about the company and what's best for the group and for the company. Sometimes this means swallowing your pride and letting your idea go. Sometimes this means spending a lot of energy trying to convince others of the "right" way. Whatever it is, keep in mind that the meeting isn't about you. Whatever the outcome is, the group owns it.

Meetings Are Expensive

Anytime you hold a meeting, it's a fairly large cost for the company. Not only are you gathering a number of company resources together in one room, you're interrupting their work and taking them away from the items they've committed to. The costs can add up pretty quickly. Hearing this might make you never want to hold a meeting, but that's not the correct response. You can probably think of quite a few meetings you've had in your career that have been really valuable, that have cleared up issues for you or answered questions you've had. Those were valuable meetings. Those meetings were worth the cost of interrupting your work and gathering you and others together. The goal with any meeting should be to make valuable for the company and the attendees despite the cost incurred.

Conclusion

So, there you have it. A few of my thoughts on meetings. There are a lot of other aspects of meetings, but this'll do for now. Meetings in the work environment can be frustrating at the beginning of your career. You may feel like nothing ever gets done. Sometimes that's true and other times you just need to be a little more patient and trust your peers. Meetings are complicated, especially when trying to reach a decision in a group. The facilitator has an important job and having a good one can make all the difference.