Leadership Without Meetings?

Being in charge sometimes seems to mean having to attend every meeting, no matter how unimportant or poorly run. What are your personal rules and practices for attending, running or avoiding meetings? Can a leader ever be meeting-free?

Daisy Wademan Dowling, executive director of leadership development at a Fortune 500 company, writes a regular column for Harvard Business Review and is the author of the 2004 book "Remember Who You Are."

The real reason leaders end up in too many meetings? Because it's flattering: having your presence "required" at many meetings makes you feel important -- it's tangible proof of how much your people and your organization need you. But being in too many meetings every day wreaks havoc on your schedule and your ability to focus on bigger goals. I've seen too many corporate leaders sacrifice their own strategic vision -- and ultimately, their own performance -- because they've let themselves become hostage to Conference Room B.

The Golden Rule of Meetings is to go to all the ones you absolutely need to and to delegate and minimize the rest. When the executives I coach are asked to go through a week of Outlook-calendar entries and systematically flag the meetings they could have sent someone else to, they're usually stunned: Suddenly, hours of previously unavailable time open up. When they resolve to keep all meetings to 15 minutes unless presented with a compelling reason otherwise, their amount of free time increases drastically again.

Delegation is scary -- what if the person you've sent to the meeting on your behalf messes up? -- and short meetings require discipline. But with the extra time generated from both techniques, you can be out doing what's important -- talking to your people, observing the organization's area for improvement, coaching your top performers, launching a new product or planning for next year.

Barry Salzberg is chief executive of Deloitte. He also is a member of Deloitte's U.S. board of directors, the Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu global executive committee and the DTT global board of directors.

After 30 years of meetings, my first question is always "Why?" Why does this topic require a meeting? Now that I'm a chief executive, I have learned to ask a second question: "Why me?" Why does this meeting require the chief executive?

For me, the deeper issue is time and how we value it, both as an organization and as individuals. Even in our virtual age, meetings are of deep human importance -- in fact, perhaps more important than ever when people spend so much time peering at pixels.

Done right, meetings bring people together, achieve clarity and agreement, and they get big things done. But still, for leaders at any level, the first question should be "Why?" How will this meeting respect and reward people's time? Could it be done virtually? Or could the organizers simply send a presentation and ask for input?

In answering this question, I suggest two critical filters: Is the meeting of strategic importance? And -- equally important -- is it of human importance, say, in strengthening a relationship or clarifying an understanding?

If a meeting is scheduled, and I agree to attend, then, bottom line, my advice to the meeting creators and all participants is to arrive prepared. Set the agenda and objectives. Give me and other participants pre-read materials. Please, let's not get lost in the slides. Instead, let's all engage in real peer-to-peer dialogue. And when we finish, let's come away with clear follow-up actions, each with an owner.

Let's be mindful of how we spend our time -- and respectful of how we spend the time of others. As Peter Drucker once put it, "Effective executives . . . start by finding where their time actually goes."

Retired Navy Capt. Bob Schoultz directs the Master of Science in Global Leadership program at the University of San Diego's School of Business Administration.

Meetings clearly serve different purposes for different people. Leaders who are extroverts need meetings to energize themselves through engagement with other people. Leaders who are introverts are more likely to limit the number and length of meetings, focus on efficiency and conclude their meetings as quickly as possible.

Subordinates learn many intangibles at meetings, having to do with mood, passion and priorities of the leaders; office politics; and coordination opportunities with other participants. While extroverts generally like meetings more than introverts, nobody likes to have his time wasted, and nobody wants to sit through a poorly run meeting.

To make daily or routine meetings more efficient, hold the meeting with all participants standing. This makes clear that it is meant to be short and perfunctory, and there is a pressure to avoid long discussions or pontification. When more relaxed team-building or brainstorming is desired, having less frequent meetings in a more relaxed setting seems to work.

Can a leader be meeting-free? I believe it is possible, but only in unusual circumstances, and only with a strong No. 2 who can look people in the eye, provide guidance, read body language, answer questions and deal in person with the human element of leadership.

And then there are competent but reclusive leaders such as Howard Hughes. Some leaders may recognize that they are very poor at dealing with people in person and delegate this key function to someone else who is good at it. But somebody needs to deal with the human factor of an organization in person. The critical element of trust in leadership is difficult, perhaps impossible, to establish and maintain solely by e-mail.