A long time ago I was a Non-Executive Director (NED) of my local Primary Care Trust (PCT).
PCT’s were part of the NHS that commissioned services for the local community. I learnt two very strange things about the NHS.
The Language
First, the language. Lawyers would be jealous if they knew how opaque the NHS language can be. There are words you recognised and which sounded and looked English but they had their own special meaning known only to insiders….
Naively… in one of my first meetings… I suggested that commissioning was essentially purchasing – we had an annual budget (£110 million which was small beer apparently as we were a small PCT with only about 110 000 residents) and we allocated it to various services. I was instantly told off sternly and without any sense of humour – apparently commissioning was in a different and much-exalted category, not comparable to purchasing at all.
I could live with the NHS having its own language but the one thing that alarmed me was meetings. Although to be fair, apparently it’s not an NHS specific issue.
Unnecessary Meetings
Up until I became a NED, I had been spared the nightmare of bad meetings. I had spent my life either in sales or running small businesses or coaching in PLCs. Every meeting I had ever been in up until the age of 35 had a purpose! I didn’t realise how lucky I was!!
A sales meeting was to announce targets, report sales, praise the performers and shame the lazy. A training meeting was to impart knowledge and facts and skills. When I was coaching PLCs – I arrived and coached and then we had lunch and I coached some more and then we went home.
When I was running 3 manufacturing companies with 140 staff – we met (me and one of the two company managers who reported to me, me and the bookkeeper who also did HR, me and the production manager, me and the sales manager, sometimes all four of us – but people would hanker to leave if they had nothing to add – there was too much to do!) when there was an issue to resolve – only the relevant people were involved – and as soon as the meeting was resolved we got on with buying stuff, manufacturing stuff with it and then selling it.
Meetings had start times but not end times – we finished as fast as we could. We broke up the morning with a management team meeting over breakfast around 09:30 and talked without agenda, ate and drank too much coffee and then got back to … buying, manufacturing and selling. That was more useful than any brainstorming meeting I’ve ever attended since.
I honestly didn’t understand why people I knew in big businesses moaned about meetings – and then I started work at the NHS.
Weekly Meetings
Along with THIRTY TWO other people, I was invited to and expected to religiously attend a WEEKLY comms meeting. This was chaired by a super-competent person who ran PALS (Patient Advice and Liaison Service).
But she wasn’t allowed to change the rules. Neither it seemed, was I.
It was an allotted time. She had a lot to get through. Very few decisions were ever made – it was all information sharing with “feedback”. All the internal “stakeholder groups” were present.
Only 3-5 people ever spoke – but they all had to be there – to keep their people up to date and to represent them. It finished more or less on time but it felt longer than it was. It was just how it was done and was part of everybody’s job description.
I shudder to think of the cascaded meetings these then triggered within each stakeholder group … or maybe …
Getting Stuff Done
90% of many people’s time within the PCT were meetings. Three days after one of these meetings – where something had been discussed, decided AND an action had been allocated to a colleague (!) – I half-walked/half-trotted with the colleague tasked from one meeting to yet another meeting and asked for an update.
Clearly close to losing her temper, she looked at me exasperated and curtly asked “When? I’ve been in back to back meetings since then!” I challenged her and she showed me her diary. Her calendar had block meetings in it all week, 2-3 a morning and the same in the afternoon.
The NHS has been great to me as a patient but it did my head in as a NED. It was like walking in waist-high treacle. Getting Stuff Done seemed impossible. Old-timers (I remember one tired GP in particular) smiled benignly at my efforts, resigned. I pushed, pleaded, begged for these meetings (60-mins a week with 32 staff on £30k a year!) to be pushed to 6 weekly or monthly – I had quickly given up on two-monthly. Or to be replaced or done another way. I think we eventually moved to fortnightly. And some fortnightly ones to monthly.
These meetings were terrible. They just stole time.
Internal meetings with clients aren’t as bad, but they do still vary in quality and productivity.
So, for them, and anyone else suffering from bad meetings – here are some great lessons from Jeff Bezos. (If you run a company more successful than his or one that has grown faster and remained profitable – no need to read on.)
Three Lessons for Good Meetings from Jeff Bezos
- No PowerPoint. Self-explanatory. To be honest I very seldom see these at meetings. Maybe that’s why my clients are ahead of their competitors?
- The 2 Pizza rule. If you can’t feed all the people with two pizzas there are too many people in the room. This is quite a fun way to tell people they can/must leave the meeting. Or the part that is not relevant to them. Maybe it should be applied to Board size too?
- Memos for each meeting. I saved the best for last! Bezos says that if you call the meeting you have to prepare a “Narrowly structured memo” which gives the context for a good discussion. Everyone starts the meeting by reading the full memo silently before discussing it. This way everyone has ACTUALLY read the memo. Bezos laughs as he says that people bluff that they’ve read the memo. This way everyone has the same basic understanding and context and is able to contribute.
In the same way that a speech is there to trigger action and generate a specific emotion; the purpose of a meeting is to make informed decisions.
If you want to learn more watch this interview of Bezos
Or read this