imapMyTeam Blog

Back to the Future: Pencil and Paper Meetings?

The headline from the business section of the Wall Street Journal got my attention last week. It read, “When Meetings Hijack the Workday”.

The article cites more and more companies are flattening their organizations and increasing demand for teamwork, innovation and collaboration. While these are key ingredients to success, many leaders and top performers are suffering from “collaborative overload”. A natural by-product of this increasingly common environment is more meetings.

Peter Drucker once said “one either meets or one works. One cannot do both at the same time.”
So what can you do to enhance the efficiency of the meetings you lead? I recently considered the time commitment to prepare and run a meeting and have recently seen some scary statistics about what people are doing (or not doing) in meetings.

My number one suggestion for making meetings more efficient would be to ban electronic devices of any kind. If you are as old as me you remember when people came to meetings just with a pad and pencil – that didn’t necessarily mean everyone was intently focused on the meeting, but they did not have external distractions of looking at a smartphone every 30 seconds.

The shear focus of everyone discussing/interacting and deciding what to do without the urge (or is it addiction) to read/send texts/emails etc. will speed up meetings in and of itself.

Another suggestion is one I learned a long time ago – do not reward tardiness by reviewing what has happened for those that are late. It is inconsiderate to those that make it on time. People that are on time are creating contractual trust with the group or team by doing what they said they would; be on time. In line with this suggestion it is also good to end on time. You have a better chance of it when you ban the electronic devices and stop wasting time by reviewing things for the tardy.

If you participate in any regularly scheduled standing meeting, make sure the purpose has not drifted from being laser focused on point to something other than the prime objective. Also make sure that the right people are in the room so you haven’t fallen prey to participant creep.

To be most effective in a meeting, you should periodically review your Manage the Meeting report in imapMyTeam®.


People will never complain about a well-run meeting and, when you make that your goal, you will also go a long way to having enthusiastic participants.