We’ve all been in a lifetime’s worth of meetings it seems. Meetings of all kinds – whether they are in-person (remember those days?), virtual, or hybrid – are just a given fixture in how organizations of all kinds get work done.

What are the odds that the next meeting you’re in will be a hit or a miss? If you’re a betting person, your chances will be much higher that your meeting will be closer to the “It sucked” end of the spectrum than the “It was super!” end.

There are two factors that play a crucial role in helping organizations get work done that matters, and to get it done well: the meeting culture and the capabilities of managers running those meetings, as seen in the venn diagram.

Meetings are generally viewed as necessary evils in the workplace. A State of Meetings report by Doodle in 2019 notes that poorly organized cost about $400 B in the US alone. A survey by Better Meetings found that 79% of people feel their meetings are out of control and that 21% of workers say the single biggest thing that would help them do more with less is having fewer meetings to get through the week. A survey of senior managers reported that 71% consider meetings to be unproductive and inefficient, according to a 2017 article “Stop the Meeting Madness” in the Harvard Business Review.

Flipping to the right side of the venn diagram, let’s take a look at managers. Hard-working, well-intentioned and skilled people moving up the ranks of the organization, managers are often promoted by virtue of great technical expertise, but may not as savvy or comfortable with the people dynamics that are an inevitable part of leading meetings.

Disengagement in the workforce is a perpetual issue that Gallup estimates costs between $450-550B annually in the US. Lack of engagement leads to a host of issues – turnover, lost productivity, declining customer service, and erosion of the workplace culture. What we also know, thanks to Gallup, is that at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement is due to managers. People leave managers, not companies, so how managers show up in their leadership has a strong impact across the organization. When you consider that only 35% of managers are engaged themselves at work, it’s challenging to do your best work when the people who are supposed to lead that effort aren’t fully bought in.

When you support people to lead Conversations that Count, you’re really addressing the nexus point. Why is it important to fix that gap and strengthen the capability of managers particularly when they are in that moment of leading their teams? I think it leads to:

• A team that looks forward to going to that next meeting because they know they’ll be heard and that their views count.
• Managers feeling more confident that they don’t need to have all the answers themselves because they have the skills to draw out the best in their people
• Reduced friction and frustration in having ineffective meetings
• Creating a sense of trust, agility and collective purpose, where you know your manager and your colleagues have each other’s back.

We’ve got some big, complex issues to solve in the world today. To solve them, we need our best collective thinking caps on to do it.