Meetings

The fastest way to suffocate a productive AEC firm isn’t bad projects or markets, it’s too many pointless meetings.

The fastest way to kill a perfectly good AEC firm is not bad markets, bad clients, or even bad projects. It’s meetings. Endless, bloated, calendar-choking meetings that make everyone feel busy while nothing actually gets done. And they are especially bad if there aren’t any fruit and pastries or donuts (I do love donuts – our office used to be located next door to a bakery and I weighed then nearly 20 pounds more than I do now!).

But back to meetings – you know the ones I’m talking about. The weekly “project status” meeting with 12 people on the invite, half of whom don’t speak. The “leadership sync” that produces no decisions but somehow spawns three more meetings. The “quick check-in” that eats an hour and a half and ends with “let’s take this offline,” which is code for “we’ll never resolve this.”

Meetings are where productivity goes to die.

Here are a few thoughts on how to fix it before your firm turns into a conference call with a payroll:

• If there’s no decision to make, don’t meet. Most meetings exist because someone feels like they should exist. Not because they need to. If there’s no clear decision on the table, cancel it. Status updates can be written. Information can be shared in two paragraphs. If you’re gathering people just to “touch base,” you’re wasting time they could be doing billable work, or, better yet, actually thinking.
• The bigger the meeting, the dumber the outcome. There’s an inverse relationship between the number of people in a meeting and the quality of the decision. Get more than six or seven people in a room and watch what happens. The loud ones talk. The quiet ones disappear. The risk tolerance drops to zero. You end up with the safest, most mediocre answer possible. Design by committee isn’t just bad for projects, it’s bad for running the business.
• Agendas are not optional. If someone can’t tell you what the meeting is about in one sentence, it shouldn’t happen. A real agenda has topics, a time limit, and a desired outcome. “Discuss marketing” is not an agenda. That’s a cry for help. Try “decide whether to hire a full-time marketing director or outsource.” Now you’ve got something.
• Start on time, end early. Nothing signals a lack of discipline like starting meetings late and letting them drift. It tells your people their time isn’t valuable. The best-run firms treat time like money. Because it is money. Start exactly when you say you will. If people are late, they can catch up. End when you’ve made the decision. If that’s 20 minutes early, congratulations. You just gave your firm a gift.
• Not everyone needs to be there. There’s this strange fear in AEC firms of leaving people out. So everyone gets invited just in case. That’s how you end up with a structural engineer sitting through a marketing discussion and a marketing person sitting through a drainage issue discussion. Invite only the people who are needed to make the decision or provide critical input. Everyone else gets the summary.
• Kill recurring meetings unless they earn their keep. Recurring meetings are the cockroaches of the business world. They survive forever, long after their purpose is gone. Just because you’ve always had a Monday morning meeting doesn’t mean you need one. Every recurring meeting should have to justify its existence. If it can’t point to specific decisions or outcomes, it’s gone.
• Someone owns the meeting. Every meeting needs a driver. Not a note taker. Not a “facilitator.” An owner who is responsible for getting to a decision. That person keeps it on track, shuts down rabbit trails, and calls the questions. Without that, you’re just hosting a group therapy session.
• Create action items or it didn’t happen. If a meeting ends without clear next steps, it was a waste of time. Who is doing what by when? Write it down. Send it out. Follow up. Otherwise, you’ll have the same conversation next week with the same people saying the same things, wondering why nothing changes.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth. Most people like meetings because they feel productive without the risk of actually producing anything. There’s no accountability in a room full of nodding heads. No one gets blamed for a bad decision because no real decision was made.

But great firms don’t run that way. They are decisive. They value time. They trust people to do their jobs without constant group validation.

If you want a quick test, look at your calendar for the next two weeks. Cut half your meetings. Just delete them. See what breaks. My guess is not much. In fact, you might find your people get more done, your projects move faster, and your clients are happier. You may even have more mental energy yourself!

Imagine that. Less talking. More doing.  More time to do work you are getting paid to do. Now that’s a competitive advantage in this business.

Mark Zweig is Zweig Group’s chairman and founder. Contact him at mzweig@zweiggroup.com.