The following 4 kinds of meetings work as well at home as at work.
By: Melissa Thoma | 07/13/2010
A quick look at my Google Calendar this week makes my workday schedule startlingly clear. Well over half my available working hours will be spent in meetings: staff, management, client meetings–not to mention the meetings associated with my board leadership and other philanthropic activities.
With that much time devoted to meetings, it’s critical that they be productive. I’ve mentioned that our senior team spent a year working with an executive coach. Among the skills he taught was how to plan, produce and document a great meeting. Ever since we learned that great meetings don’t just happen, we spend a lot of energy and intention making sure our meetings start on time, end on time, have a published agenda, and participants who show up informed and prepared to work.
Effective business leadership requires meetings–and lots of them. Good meetings are a reflection of a good leader. I’ve also learned that good meetings are imperative to running a marriage. What sets a “meeting” apart from ordinary marital discourse are the intention and focus. It’s that extra emphasis on structure and discipline that creates a positive environment for listening and acting–rather than reacting.
As homework during our coaching experience, we read Patrick Lencioni’s accessible little business fable, Death by Meeting. In it, Lencioni explores the reasons most workplace meetings are such abject time-wasters. And he prescribes four types of meetings designed to address four specific types of objectives–formats I’ve found work just as well at home as at the office.
Lencioni argues that most meetings fail because they lack two key components: drama, and context or purpose. Drama is necessary to help participants grasp the relative importance of the subject matter. I’d have to say that in my experience there is no shortage of drama in most family or home meetings. At our house, if it’s important enough to call a meeting, it’s important. In fact, the simple act of calling a “meeting” tends to acknowledge the drama inherent in the situation–with no need to create any extra. But in marriage, creating context and purpose is really important.
Ever try to have a serious talk with your spouse about a situation in which you both deviate, discuss, disagree and digress to the conversation’s end, only to walk away with nothing decided? I think this happens quite frequently.
For instance: The sink is leaking in the kids’ bathroom upstairs. First, there is the conversation that raises the problem. “Hey, I went in the kids’ bathroom and water was just dribbling out of the faucet, even though it was tightly closed,” you say.
“Yeah,” he says, “I noticed that, too.”
“Why didn’t you say anything about that to me?”
“Mmmm . . . I was going to fix it last weekend, but I didn’t get around to it.”
End of first conversation. The second conversation goes like this. “Did you ever do anything about
the kids’ faucet?”
“Mmmm . . . no, that kind of slipped my mind.”
“I have to do everything myself around here. Nothing ever gets done. Jeez, it’s been a month since we talked about this.”
Familiar? Context and purpose in a conversation are really helpful. Such as, “I wanted you to know that the kids’ faucet is leaking and I would like you to take the lead in getting it fixed.” Hear the context (leaking faucet problem) and the purpose (wanting to negotiate for your spouse to take the lead in fixing it).
Lencioni offers a system of very purposeful meetings that help provide appropriate context for work meetings. They include the daily check-in, the weekly tactical, the monthly strategic and the quarterly off-site. These four meeting types make excellent structures at home.
At work, our firm uses a daily huddle to check in. We meet standing up at 8:30 a.m. sharp for no more than 15 minutes. We record daily “must-do’s” on a wall chart just like they use in ERs to triage patients. We get in and out of the meeting, and everybody leaves with clarity about the day’s objectives.
At home, Martin and I begin each morning over coffee with a daily check-in. It’s so vital to our home life that I don’t leave the house without doing the same check-in with each child. You’d be surprised what surfaces when you thought you knew everything about the day.
Next comes the weekly tactical. Martin and I have had various degrees of formality with this one, but because we both use Stephen Covey’s time-management and planning system, we both do our weekly planning on either Sunday evening or Monday. What has to happen this week for our home to function optimally? What calls must be made, what kids must be where, what workmen must be met? This weekly tactical allows us to be full partners to each other and keeps a lot of stuff from falling between the cracks. Sunday evening is a great time to conduct this meeting.
What you’ll find with these daily and weekly check-ins is that they lose their usefulness if you get into big-picture stuff such as “We need a better budget” or “What are we going to do about Junior’s refusal to potty train?”
For those bigger issues, Lencioni suggests a monthly strategic meeting. We do this at Thoma Thoma: Each month our senior team comes together specifically to monitor progress on product and service development, staff mentoring and coaching, budget monitoring and so forth.
Many couples make a commitment to a regular date. Perhaps once a month, part of your evening is devoted to bigger-picture strategizing. If you make a strategy without any tactical “touch bases,” you are pretty sure to wind up with nothing getting done. If you are all tactics with no time to think big, you’ll take the magic right out of your marriage and life. It can be mind-boggling to try to accommodate tactics and strategy in one meeting, so I really like the way Lencioni has taught us to break it down to weekly tactical meetings and monthly strategy meetings.
The quarterly off-site is a fairly typical meeting in the workplace, but it’s not practiced too often at home. Early in our marriage when Martin and I had small kids at home and very little time to ourselves, we actually got “off site” every three to four months. We went overnight to fun little resort towns near Little Rock or, occasionally, just to a downtown hotel.
Trips away are times to re-energize, renew connections and spark dreams. It’s when you’re out from under the daily distractions that big, bold, lifetime goals and dreams bubble up and enter the conversation.
This commitment to time away–off-site–did more for our marriage than almost anything else. After all, off-site strategic meetings are for reflecting on our mission, values and commitments. Perfect for marriage!
So there you have it: meeting formats to focus the content and purpose appropriately to the task. Martin and I have found the sense of shared purpose and co-creation engendered by our meetings to be a powerful force that continues drawing our lives together. And when you consider the number of recent high-profile divorces among couples who “just drifted apart,” continually turning toward each other in some great meetings is surely a good thing.