To meet or not to meet? That is the question
Break Week is over for our team. It’s one of the best things we do to ensure we stay refreshed and energized to give you our very best.
And that leads to this week’s post . . . I want to tell you a story about how my team and I recently got aligned on huge decisions in our business and our strategy for the future—without ever having a single meeting.
But for me to tell you about that, we have to start at the beginning.
In the early days of our team, meetings were all we knew. If we needed to address an issue, we addressed it in a meeting. I think back to those days and I cringe. Our team meetings were not effective. In fact, they were a mess. We had no agendas; we would get completely derailed by the urgent issues of the day; we never accomplished anything; and even worse, we would often talk about issues that only involved a couple of people in the meeting—which meant that everyone else watched two people have a meeting.
To put it lightly, our meetings were a waste of time. And they continued to be so until we read Patrick Lencioni’s Death By Meeting for one of our team book club discussions.
The book changed everything for us. In it, Lencioni makes the case that when they’re not done well, meetings can become “deadly.” As we read, we realized that the “deadly” meetings he described were exactly the kind of meetings we had been having.
The first thing we learned about and implemented was how to bring structure and order to our chaotic meetings. Lencioni says that every single meeting, no matter how long it is or how often you have it, should have 1) a defined purpose, and 2) a written agenda that every single attendee can see. Aside from that, Lencioni says you need to be intentional about who attends the meeting. Is the whole meeting relevant to every single person there? If not, then narrow down the attendees.
Implementing structure was the first big step to making our meetings less “deadly.” We started to notice a difference right away: Instead of being places for long, winding, less-than-impactful discussions, our meetings started to become places of purpose and clarity. We knew what we were there to accomplish, and we did. We didn’t just talk about our challenges; we actually worked through them. We started to leave meetings feeling lighter, like we had actually crossed things off our lists.
We also got really strict about the kinds of topics discussed at team meetings. For example, if someone brought up a topic that only involved two people on the team, we would pause the conversation and remind that person that we’d made a commitment that we would only talk about the things that the whole team needed to weigh in on or know about in our team meetings. Anything else would need to be discussed outside of the meeting. Making that shift turned our meetings into places of true collaboration.
Eventually, we started to make so much momentum in our meetings that we wanted to keep it up after our time together ended. We didn’t want to wait until the next week to talk about a particular issue again, but we also didn’t want to add a bunch of additional meetings to our calendars. We started to think about how we might be able to keep the conversation and our collaboration going without having a meeting.
That’s when we decided to start using WhatsApp as a team. WhatsApp has a voice messaging function that not only allows you to hear someone’s voice and tone (which is so important when it comes to communication), but also lets you pause, speed up, and save messages in case you need to reference them later.
That was the start of learning how to communicate asynchronously. We stopped scheduling meetings every time we needed to discuss something with someone else, and we stopped waiting until team meetings to make progress on issues that needed our collaboration. We leaned into WhatsApp instead.
Nowadays, our team meets just once a week, and everything else happens on WhatsApp. We love this way of communicating because as a remote team, we all work different schedules and live in different places. It’s much easier to send someone a message that they can listen to at a time that works for them than it is to find a mutual time to meet. In order for this system to work, we had to get aligned on our expectations of one another: We decided that whenever we send a voice message, we will include a response deadline so that the person receiving it doesn’t feel like they have to respond right away if it isn’t urgent.
So now, the story.
If you read my post about my visionary process, you know that I’ve been thinking about the next evolution of our business. I got clear on a few initiatives I’m really excited about for the future that I wanted our team to give their input on, and I had a few options: I could wait until our team meeting to discuss them and get everyone’s feedback—but our next meeting was more than a week away. I could schedule an additional meeting and bring everyone together—but we all already had a lot of commitments that week, and it would be hard to find a time. Or, I could send my ideas on WhatsApp and experiment with doing this whole thing asynchronously.
I decided to use WhatsApp. While I’ve sent strategic ideas there before, I hadn’t shared anything of this magnitude. I wasn’t sure how it would go. I knew there was a chance we might need to have a meeting about it anyway if WhatsApp turned out not to be the most effective place to share the idea, but I was willing to try and learn from it.
It went better than I could have imagined: I shared my ideas and gave everyone time to think about them, and within the same week, everyone had weighed in with their own voice messages back to me. By the time our next meeting came around, we didn’t even need to follow up on what we’d discussed over WhatsApp; we were already completely aligned on our decisions and had already taken next steps to get some of these initiatives started. Had I waited, we would have lost a whole week of progress.
When I think about those early days and our deadlier than deadly meetings, I can see how far we’ve come. But I also want to acknowledge that I am not saying asynchronous communication is the only way we should communicate with our teams. We treasure our weekly team meeting, and that’s because we’ve learned how to make that time count.
I think we need a mix of both. In my opinion, the most collaborative and effective teams are the ones that can strike the balance between the two. Just think about how much more progress we could make if our meetings were places of purpose and collaboration—and if we also didn’t wait to address things until we had a meeting.
I’m curious . . . What do meetings look like on your team? Do you have symptoms of “deadly” meetings? Do you have a structure for communication and collaboration outside of meetings? What has your team done to ensure that you have more effective team meetings and/or asynchronous communication? Hit “reply” and tell us all about it! We’d love to learn about your experience.
Big hugs,
