Why Your Meetings are Set Up to Fail

Meetings are a huge waste of time and money.

And I mean huge. We spend $37 billion per year on unproductive meetings. Our rockstar executives spend 50% of their time in meetings, yet consider 67% of those meetings to be failures. We have no idea what’s wrong, yet we continue to schedule meetings every day.

What’s our problem?

The truth is that we set ourselves up for failure right from the very beginning. We create an enemy that starts to poison our meeting before it has even begun. The tricky part is that we actually think this enemy is our friend, which is why we never enter a meeting without one.

Say hello to your old frenemy, The Agenda.

On the surface, The Agenda looks like a hugely valuable tool to keep us focused and productive. And it does. Only it generally keeps us focused and productive on the wrong things. The problem lies not in the tool itself, but in the type of agenda we create. We are creating WHAT Agendas. We need to be creating WHY Agendas.

A WHAT Agenda lists all of the information we want to tackle in the meeting. A WHY Agenda lists the purpose of attendees’ receipt of the information.

A WHAT Agenda is all about things. A WHY Agenda is all about people.

We are all painfully familiar with a WHAT Agenda, which might look something like this:

8:00 am—8:10 am: Introductions
8:10 am—8:20 am: Q1 Recap
8:20 am—8:30 am: Q2 Goals
8:30 am—8:45 am: Case Study Example
8:45 am—9:45 am: Idea Brainstorm
9:45 am—10:00 am: Wrap Up

There are two big problems with a WHAT Agenda.

First, it’s a list of to-dos instead of a strategic progression to an output.

In his book, The One Thing, Gary Keller talks about our misguided and insatiable need to check multiple things off of our to-do lists instead of focusing on the one thing we can do that such by doing it, everything else becomes easier or unnecessary. We feel productive when we are tackling a to-do list, when in reality, it just keeps us busy instead of laser-focused on the one thing that leads to success. A WHAT Agenda is just a fancy version of a big ol’ to-do list.

Second, it’s all about you, not them.

The best business advice I ever received is to make it all about them, not you. It’s not about what you want. The market doesn’t care what you want, your team doesn’t care what you want. It’s about them. What’s in it for them, how does it help them? The WHAT Agenda is the opposite of this. It has nothing to do with what’s in it for the people in the room, and only to do with what the meeting organizer wants done.

If we want our meetings to matter, we have to embrace a new kind of agenda—The WHY Agenda.

Here is what the same meeting as exampled above might look like as a WHY Agenda:

8:00 am—8:10 am: Create the right mindset.
8:10 am—8:20 am: Ensure we are all on the same page.
8:20 am—8:30 am: Understand the meeting’s mission and output goal.
8:30 am—8:45 am: Inspire big-thinking vision and show what’s possible.
8:45 am—9:45 am: Spark rapid-fire creativity.
9:45 am—10:00 am: Leave them feeling energized, anticipating next steps, and inspired to do the work.

The WHY Agenda is a purpose-driven progression to an output. When we start with the end goal and focus on the “why” behind each progression, we can reverse engineer the entire meeting. When we reverse engineer, our agenda items often change. For instance, if the goal of this section of the meeting is to inspire big-thinking vision and show what’s possible, is a case study example the best way to do that? Maybe there’s a better way. And if it is the best tactic, perhaps the “why” changes the way you present it, focusing more on emotional impact than data and stats, for instance.   

The WHY Agenda’s main superpower is that it focuses on tapping your most powerful asset—your people. The WHY Agenda is all about the people in the room and the effect on them. As the meeting leader, you have only one job and that is to be your audience’s advocate. Each agenda you put together—whether it’s for your big annual conference or a weekly status meeting—should fight tooth and nail for what’s in it for THEM. If a meeting doesn’t inspire and ignite the people in the room, it is a failure.

The Agenda is extremely powerful. Do you treat it with the respect it deserves, or are you one of the millions of people who throw it together last minute or delegate it haphazardly?

Remember, with great power comes great responsibility.

Make your agenda matter.