As I came into 2016 I wanted to give audiobooks a try. I never had done one. But seeing as I live in the world’s worst traffic city and spend at least 10 hours a week trapped in a car or somewhere else because I can’t get to where I want to go, I’ve had a personal goal of trying to figure out how I can leverage that dead space into something that can add to my development and intellectual and leadership capacity.
I managed to figure out how to get everything set up and got an audiobook system linked up with our public library in the U.S. and I was finally good to go. I’m teaching a Strategic & Organizational Leadership course right now so I wanted to read a couple things that might help me as I train leaders in some of these core leadership areas.
The first book I took on was Death by Meeting by Patrick Lencioni. First, his books seem like ideal audiobooks because they are mostly narrative. I had some bad traffic the day I embarked on this and ended up listening to the entire book on my 2 work drives of the day. I listened to it in one day! That got my disproportionately excited that I could be that efficient when so many things in the Philippines do not tend to be very efficient. I got hooked on the audiobooks for my drives and found an app to listen to other lecture and audio at a faster pace. I like listening to things around 1.2x or 1.25x speed and the apple products only only 1x or 1.5x.
The book has been around awhile and I’ve been aware of the gist of it from summary notes and the like – but I enjoyed reading it all the way through because it crystallized for me how important drama, context, and purpose are to meaningful and high performance meetings. These three elements are what Lencioni goes after and it’s always resonated with me – especially drama and purpose.
He borrows from Hollywood to illustrate how important it is to keep people engaged. That’s the leader’s job and meetings that are not compelling or that fail to have people engage means there’s a problem.
The context part is key because you need containers or mental models to influence expectations and set parameters for meetings so that they can serve a higher purpose. So in the book Lencioni talks about 4 different types of meetings: a 5 minute standup meeting for daily checkins and scheduling, a weekly tactical that lasts about an hour for direct reporting and ongoing needed communication, a monthly strategic where deeper thinking and discussion can be targeted, and a quarterly 1-2 day offsite meeting for bigger picture dialogue and discussion.
There’s plenty here that doesn’t relate to my situation or many people’s situations , but I love the heart of the idea that meetings aren’t a necessary evil – it’s where leadership happens and leaders need to own that. So we can make meetings better, more engaging, and more effective in light of the big picture as opposed to complaining about them and playing the victim.
Meetings is where leadership influence is exerted, where leaders are empowered, where skills are modeled and transferred, and where vision and hope can be nurtured and kept alive. I agree that leaders should stop dogging meetings and double down on trying to become the best leaders of meetings that they possible can be.
Check out Lencioni’s site at tablegroup.com for more
