What Did That Meeting Cost You

What Did That Meeting Cost You?

A company director copied me on an email he sent to his leadership team. He fulfills the Sales Management role, but we ascertained that he spent a lot of time getting involved in operations, customer service, marketing, and product development meetings.

“Morning team,

Recently, I’ve been doing some personal development in the Time & Task management space, which has been invigorating. With the help of Stephen Lynch, I’ve completed 20 days of time tracking, which captures every 30-minute slot of my day. The findings are very interesting.

I’ve fallen into the common trap of being accessible & available to everyone across the business, and not prioritising my most important role, which is driving sales revenue.

Just for example, meetings scheduled in my calendar for next week alone total a massive 30 hours!

So from today, you’ll see me declining to attend a bunch of meetings to free up my calendar. This isn’t personal, rather just a realignment of my priorities in favour of growing sales. 

Any questions that arise from meetings or subjects that require my attention or input, can be requested via email. And I’ll be allotting time to review/comment on meeting minutes & reports.

Additionally, I’ll be ring-fencing Mondays as my meeting day to attend essential ones. I trust you understand my rationale. Any comments or questions, please let me know.

Kind regards, (name)…“

— 

I sent a message of kudos to the manager and jotted down the following additional recommendations.

What Did That Meeting Cost You?

A lot of time and money is squandered with inefficient meetings. For starters, there’s the cost of people’s salaries who attend the meeting. 

Imagine you have 5 people in attendance, and they’re on annual salaries of $100K per year. This works out to an hourly rate of (roughly) $50 per hour. Of course, some people are paid more, some are paid less, but my quick and dirty rule of thumb is that every meeting costs $50 per hour, per person to hold. So, a 1-hour meeting with 5 people costs $250 in direct salaries.

Ask yourself, “Is this meeting worth $250?” Is it worth pulling people away from other productive work?

“Am I willing to pay $250 out of my own pocket to have this meeting?” Because, if you have ownership in the company, that IS what you are paying.

But perhaps more importantly, there is the opportunity cost of what each person could be working on if they didn’t have to attend the meeting. 

List all the meetings you attend and ask yourself, “Is this a high-value use of time for someone in my role?”

In the case of my Sales Manager client, attending meetings for other functions (Operations, Customer Service, Marketing, Product Development, etc) meant time away from coaching and supporting his sales team, and time away from negotiating directly with key accounts.

10X Management Tasks

These 4 buckets contain the high-value, high-leverage tasks where you can potentially get 10X returns on your time and energy as a manager.  I call these your 10X management tasks.

  1. Planning
  2. Organizing
  3. Observing
  4. Coaching

I have a saying, “Strategy Execution is 20% getting clear about what needs to be done, and 80% following up to make sure it actually gets done”.

In a sales management example, you would ideally spend 20% of your time planning and organizing, and 80% of your time observing, coaching, and supporting your sales team with customer interactions.

Regardless of what function you manage, are you spending enough time observing and coaching the work of your team?

I doubt it. What does your calendar say? If you were to track your time for 20 days like my client did, what would your calendar tell me?

The DAI Formula for Meetings

Another filter to help you determine which meetings to attend is the D.A.I. formula.

D = Decision Maker: Must attend
If I am the decision maker, I must attend the meeting. Or, can I delegate the decision-making authority to someone else?

A = Advice: Optional attendance.
If the decision maker needs my advice, in real-time, AT the meeting, then I probably should attend. But where possible, it is more efficient to share my input in writing prior and skip the meeting

I = Informed. Should not attend.
If I just want to be informed about what is going on, NO, I should NOT attend the meeting

This is where keeping robust meeting notes becomes crucial.  I urge my clients to create a policy where every meeting held in the company must publish robust meeting notes covering:  

  1. Who was there 
  2. What topics were discussed 
  3. What decisions were made
  4. What actions were assigned, and to whom 

Meeting notes are posted in a relevant discussion channel (Slack, Teams, etc). You can tag people to notify them, and non-attendees can add comments or ask questions in the channel afterwards.

Whether you use a software tool to capture meeting notes or type them manually, the notes must be robust enough for a non-attendee to spend 2 minutes reading the notes and have a clear picture of what went on. 

Robust meeting notes

Ask yourself, “Which meetings would I no longer attend, if the facilitator ran an effective meeting, and I could access robust meeting notes that kept me informed about what went on?”

My experience with clients is that if you institute and enforce such a policy, you will attend fewer meetings. You can then invest your precious time in high-value, high-leverage tasks and be far more effective as a leader.

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Until next time…
Stephen