Meetings are Not Pop Quizzes

Let’s say I’m a coworker of yours. I send you an email with no subject line, and you aren’t using a preview pane in your email reader. You have no idea why I’m contacting you. You know that the email is from me, you know when the message was received, you know that it’s not a high or low priority message, and that’s it.

How do you evaluate this message? It might be critical. You might need to respond in the next five minutes, or it might be something you can get to on Friday. Or it might contain a question outside of your domain… but you might know the person who can answer it. How can you possibly know what to do with this communication?

The short answer: you can’t – at least not quickly. You need to open up the message, scan or read it, and evaluate further. This message is now taking up actual work time… all because it didn’t provide the right information.
Sure, you might not send an email without a subject line. But are you sending meeting invitations without agendas?

Clues

We have a myriad ways to contact people. Many of these inputs (email messages, instant messages, phone calls) can provide context to their importance and purpose but all too often I see meeting invitations fail to live up to these standards.

Just a few weeks ago I received a meeting invite with a subject and absolutely no notes. I had worked on a project related to the subject, but had never worked with the meeting organizer before and in fact didn’t know who she was. There were three peers in this meeting with me. I asked the organizer to send an agenda, but ultimately she didn’t.

I chatted with one of the other attendees and asked him what the meeting was all about. “I don’t know, and I hoped you knew!” he said. He was as confused as I was! So here we were heading into this meeting as if it were a pop quiz. We knew the subject, but how could we possibly prepare for it?

Meetings without agendas force the participants to assess priority and the purpose of the meeting without any real tools to do so. Very unfair.

Agenda Deployment Time

This prompted me to look back at some of my own meetings from the past month and, admittedly, I found a few without notes in the invite. How embarrassing. Worse, as time had passed since these meetings I had very limited context around them just by looking at my calendar. Luckily I had taken notes, but not every meeting is so lucky.

To clean up this blunder I chose to carve out a small block of time each week: “Agenda Deployment Time.” For me it worked best as the first item on my calendar every Monday at 9am. My process was straightforward: review my week’s meetings and ask, “Does every meeting have a clear agenda?”

If a meeting I called didn’t have an agenda, I would either create one or cancel the meeting. Similarly, if I was invited to an agenda-less meeting I’d contact the organizer by email or phone and ask for one.

Within a few weeks I fully incorporated agenda creation into my normal meeting invitation process; at that point I felt comfortable canceling Agenda Deployment Time and reallocating it to Complain About Office Coffee Time.

Respect

Providing an agenda says, “I know your time is valuable, and I respect you.”

The example at the outset involving an email message may seem simple but even it carries a time cost. Meetings up the stakes considerably, as they include the preparation and action items in addition to the actual meeting itself.

As we think about improving communication on the path to leadership, we can’t forget the day to day interactions that really build our brand and credibility. I encourage you to look at your meeting invites and evaluate how effective they really are.