By Jeff Smith

I’m tired of meetings that suck

Here’s 5 reasons why Jesus would never have done this Read the rest of this entry »

It starts with your philosophy.

Command your people in a way that gives them a higher shared purpose.

You can lead them to death.

You can lead them to life.

They must never fear danger or dishonesty.

- Sun Tzu The Art of War

Today we take a break from The Great Emergence and talk about meetings.  Ah yes, welcome to hell.  I hear your inner groan – and I share it.  Most of us are in way too many meetings and way too many of those meetings suck.  There is no nicer way to say it and do them justice.

The past few decades I’ve been a teacher and I always (yes always) brought papers to grade to every meeting.  Not because I didn’t want to pay attention (I wanted to).  But rather because most of the meetings that I go to are bone-chillingly boring.  They add no value to my profession, my character or my tribe.  So, like all of you, I bring something else to do (just in case).

Every once in a while, a good meeting will surprise me, but most of the time, I grade papers (at least I can get something done if I have to be locked in purgatory.)

The saddest part of all this, all the time we spend, all the hours consumed by these torture-chambers (I mean meetings) is that they can work – it is possible to have meetings that people care about.  Things can be structured in such a way that committed people do committed work in and before meetings that matter.  But they have to matter, if they don’t, bring some papers to grade or some knitting to do.

At Off the Map, we tell leaders that the life-blood of their communities/organizations is their meetings.  How they gather together and what they do together is more important than why.  Put another way, the vision statement is only as good as the journey towards that vision – what Sun Tzu calls a “higher shared purpose”.

We lead people to death (in bad meetings) or to life (in meetings that matter).  Make no mistake about it.  But (and this is a big but) they “must never fear danger or dishonesty”.  To me these are the two biggest killers of meetings that matter.

If leaders don’t have the guts to discuss “real stuff” (dangerous stuff) then I (usually) know how the meeting will go.

• Tom will start by saying X,
• Pam will disagree,
• Lynn will side with Pam,
• Tom will get loud…
• and we’ll all go away with nothing changed (sound familiar?)

The other way leaders kill meetings is by their dishonesty.  By this I mean they’re not being honest about why we need to meet.

1. Is a decision going to be made?
2. By whom?
3. Do you really need our input or is this just window-dressing (making it look as if you’re minding the troops)?

Answering these questions requires honesty on the part of the leader and the fact is – we have way too many dishonest or danger-avoiding leaders.

Tomorrow, we’ll look at what Sun Tzu recommends to have wars (or meetings) that matter.