Murder Meetings Inc.

 

At least at offsite hell, icebreakers go quickly.

Today, in my tour of the World's Most Useless Meetings I'll concentrate on that management special, the Leadership Offsite.

The Leadership Offsite Meeting

The meeting's name itself is often a bold affront to one's logical sensibilities as the meeting is frequently held at one of the company's offices with everyone locked in a conference room for a full day's worth of discourse.

Occasionally, at the executive level, the meeting is located somewhere outside of the company's blast zone, which almost seems like a stranger hell - go to someplace exotic and confine yourself to a conference room under the guise of reducing distractions while missing out on the locale's particular color (except for that box lunch you're getting from some nearby chain restaurant).

With the location decided, the prep work begins - usually 2-4 days' worth of agenda topics that aren't finalized until the day before the meeting starts and a bevy of action items requiring the composition of that most managerial tool of communication - the slide deck.

While there are uses for a slide deck (I think), its place as the de facto method of imparting information to management is mind-boggling.  Often the decks are populated with large walls of text, defeating the purpose of using them for visual aids, or are peppered with graphs illustrating trends of cherry-picked or dubious statistical significance.

Even with that in mind, I can still see their value as visual aids, but if you're spending time finding just the right graphic to pep up your presentation, you're probably focusing on the wrong outcome for your meeting.

After agenda solicitation and prep work (much of which is also done after long evenings with colleagues during the offsite for items that show up later in the week), the offsite inevitably commences with an icebreaker.

There are a few icebreakers that I've found to be entertaining, but none of them have achieved the purpose of facilitating communication among the attendees.  The attendees are either already well-acquainted, and the icebreaker is extraneous or it's just adding to the awkwardness of the moment when the question Who would you most/least like to see naked in the room? arises among a group of relative strangers.

The meeting has now hit its high point and is ready to devolve.  The offsites that I've attended typically have agendas along the following lines:

  • Focus on the generically formulated goals that the CEO has issued and that people parrot in hallowed, whispered tones as though issued from a sacred deity (until the next group of generically formulated goals appears which may or may not contradict the previous ones).
  • A long-term strategy for product goals not mentioned explicitly by the CEO - effectively items that will provide a competitive advantage that are not business as usual.
  • A discussion on reducing technology debt and tech-specific initiatives.
  • A discussion on the current organization structure and whether or not it's efficient.
  • Current discussions on employee engagement results.
  • Discussing modes to identify and reward high performers. 
As topics go, these are core strategic concepts that management should address, and, even if this were the standing agenda for offsites, it would still be worthwhile.

What tends to happen, though, is that the first item is given a duration that appears deceptively reasonable but halfway through the morning of the first day shows that everything will soon exceed its allotted duration and go off the rails.

Why?
  • Mincing words is the standard operating procedure at a management offsite.  Clear communication is key, especially when presenting ideas as a unified leadership group, but people seem to believe that exacting definitions of every possible word lead to clearer communication.  I'll respond to that belief by asking another question (or two).  What's easier to understand - a straightforward summary or a contract?  Which one is more precise?
    • In addition, leadership doesn't need to be in lockstep.  Airing grievances in realtime probably isn't the best way to instill confidence in your employees, but it's ok to say that some topics are controversial and unresolved.  People appreciate when you treat them like the adults that they are.
  • Inexplicably, even though everything a CEO issues related to goals is exactly the same as the last missive they issued dressed up in the latest MBA language, everyone believes they need to start anew (or they start anew with the glint in their eye that they're proving they're working hard by going back to the drawing board).
    • I'm picking on the CEO's topics here (they'll be fine.  They get paid enough to take it), but this is every topic on the agenda.
  • The meetings are usually large enough that the spider web of communication nodes becomes fairly dense and tangents can easily arise and hijack the conversation for hours.  That, coupled with people's baffling belief that adhering to a schedule and an agenda will either be perceived as rude or that all tangents lead to epiphanies (the dreaded "everything is important" phenomenon) draws every topic out.  
    • Limit people to the time and topic being addressed.  If there's another important issue, make time for it in the future.  There's always some important issue that's not being addressed, but that's what happens when you live like a sucker in a bounded space-time continuum like all of us hapless humans.
  • Despite the fact that it's an offsite, some other extremely important meeting will preempt at least some subset of the leadership for some significant portion of time, disrupting the flow or triggering a review of previously settled material.
The real magic happens at the end of the offsite, when, after shoehorning the last day's agenda into 1-2 hours, everyone returns home and, with the exception of some incomplete notes outlining key points, there's no visible progress as a result of the meeting.  

Answers?

I mentioned above that the topics at an offsite are important, but it's often the execution that falls apart.  In addition, there is value in meeting up with your colleagues on a periodic basis to know them better as flesh and blood people rather than extremely realistic 2-D Zoom avatars.

If your main focus is connection, then be honest and cut the agenda to half days.  Spend time mingling with teams that you don't mingle with and invite them to ask hard questions that will challenge you as a group as part of an impromptu exercise.  At that point, you're extending your ability to connect not only with your peers, but also with the people that report up through your management team.

If it's imperative that you address the agenda items in full, then do so, but be disciplined.  Tell everyone they need to compile a one-page summary ahead of time and send it out to the team, so a lot of the effluvia can be bypassed during the actual meeting while focusing on key concepts.

Stick to the agenda and its time limits.  People will need to force themselves to concentrate.  Anything that's cut off can be recorded for later evaluation.

Make sure to take action on the meeting's outcomes and track their status no later than the next offsite.

Also, consider that each of these topics can be broken out into smaller (possibly virtual) sessions if needed.  Everyone falls prey to the fallacy that a concentrated effort minimizing distractions will yield the purest results.  But humans have limited attention spans and life will inevitably provide you with distractions you can't avoid, so expect them.  Very little in this life is an all-or-nothing shot, so don't sweat it if you failed the icebreaker to kick off the meeting and everything went south afterward.

Until next time, my human and robot friends.  


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