How To Optimize Everyone’s Time By Skipping Parts Of Meetings

People appreciate those who are all-in all the time. Her actions speak volumes about her passion and dedication. The problem is that it’s exhausting and inefficient. You can’t be always and everywhere. Consistent with Tuesday’s article on team time management, stop trying to be at every meeting, and specifically stop trying to be at every meeting. Instead, consider only showing up to the most valuable parts of the most valuable meetings.

You can only do one of four things in meetings: learn, contribute, decide, or waste time. So skip the parts where you don’t do any of the first three.

When you study, only visit the parts where you have something to learn.

If you contribute, only participate in those parts where you can contribute.

If you decide, only participate in those parts that are necessary for you to make a decision. In many cases, you can let the rest of the meeting attendees accelerate their learning and contribute to a recommendation. Then you can come in, get a summary of their learning and a briefing on the reasons for their recommendation, and either help them continue to improve their thinking, or make your decision and leave Dodge.

Imagine a day of eight consecutive one-hour meetings. Attending all of these meetings would take eight hours of your time.

On the other hand, if you let people collaborate for 45 minutes in each meeting and then come in for the last 15 minutes to hear their insights and recommendations, you could free up six hours for other things.

Obviously this is an oversimplification. You will probably want to attend all meetings. Just not all meetings.

The art of delegating

This ties directly to the Art of Delegating framework and is one of the tools you will use when delegating and trusting.

1. Doing good for yourself – the focus of the individual participants
2. Do Yourself, But Just Good Enough – Individual Contributors
3. Delegating and supervising – the domain of managers
4. Delegate and trust – leaders empower and empower managers
5. Do Later – Prioritization/deprioritization by senior executives now saves others time
6. Do never – The ultimate executive deprioritization that saves others time and attention

In addition, delegating and trusting requires particularly clear delegation in relation to:

• Direction/goals/desired outcomes/intent
• resources (human, financial, technical or operational)
• authority make tactical decisions within strategic boundaries/guidelines
• accountability and consequences (performance standards, time expectations, positive and negative consequences of success and failure)

Span of control and number of priorities

This is important in part because of the inverse relationship between the span of control and the number of priorities.

More Juniortask-oriented people can focus on maybe five things at once.

More Senior Leaders should probably have no more than three priorities of their own and delegate primary responsibility for the rest.

CEOs should lead one or, if overloaded, two corporate-level priorities simultaneously. This is because the top-performing CEOs spend 25% or more of their time managing their board and ownership, and spend 25% or more of their time speaking externally to customers, suppliers, leaders, the media, and the like. That means they have to spend less than 50% of their time inward.

Two way time management

If you do this well, your employees can be part of a two-way approach to time management where everything is clear when you come to a meeting to:

• Decide or approve in response to a well thought out and well presented recommendation.
• Contribute as a coach or guide, not as a boss.
• Find out about things before or after they happen so you can use that knowledge elsewhere.

communication

This requires a focus on communication so people know when to let you know in advance or when to report after the fact

If you:

• QuestionsYou can tell them what to do and they can stick to it.
• To discussyou can find out together by both contributing.
• Recommend, she can improve their best current thinking without diluting their engagement.
• Inform You about what you intend to do before you do it, you can still make submissions or not – which in some cases might exercise your veto power.
• report for you afterwards, she can prepare for what happens next.
• Skip Sharing information with you allows you to focus on other things.

click here for a list of my Forbes articles (of which this is #795) and a synopsis of my book on executive onboarding: The new leader’s 100-day plan of action.