Death by Meeting Quotes

“When a group of intelligent people come together to talk about issues that matter, it is both natural and productive for disagreement to occur. Resolving those issues is what makes a meeting productive, engaging, even fun.”
― Patrick Lencioni, Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business

“The hard truth is, bad meetings almost always lead to bad decisions, which is the best recipe for mediocrity.”
― Patrick Lencioni, Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business

“Effective off-sites provide executives an opportunity to regularly step away from the daily, weekly, even monthly issues that occupy their attention, so they can review the business in a more holistic, long-term manner. Topics for reflection and discussion at a productive Quarterly Off-Site Review might include the following: Comprehensive Strategy Review: Executives should reassess their strategic direction, not every day as so many do, but three or four times a year. Industries change and new competitive threats emerge that call for different approaches. Reviewing strategies annually or semiannually is usually not often enough to stay current. Team Review: Executives should regularly assess themselves and their behaviors as a team, identifying trends or tendencies that may not be serving the organization. This often requires a change of scenery so that executives can interact with one another on a more personal level and remind themselves of their collective commitments to the team. Personnel Review: Three or four times a year, executives should talk, across departments, about the key employees within the organization. Every member of an executive team should know whom their peers view as their stars, as well as their poor performers. This allows executives to provide perspectives that might actually alter those perceptions based on different experiences and points of view. More important, it allows them to jointly manage and retain top performers, and work with poor performers similarly. Competitive and Industry Review: Information about competitors and industry trends bleeds into an organization little by little over time. It is useful for executives to step back and look at what is happening around them in a more comprehensive way so they can spot trends that individual nuggets of information might not make clear. Even the best executives can lose sight of the forest for the trees when inundated with daily responsibilities.”
― Patrick Lencioni, Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business

“Another challenge in making strategic meetings work is the failure to do research and preparation ahead of time. The quality of a strategic discussion, and the decision that results from it, are improved greatly by a little preliminary work. This eliminates the all-too-common reliance on anecdotal decision making. The key to ensuring that preparation occurs is to let team members know as far in advance as possible what issues will be discussed during the Monthly or Ad Hoc Strategic.”
― Patrick Lencioni, Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business

“Real-Time Agenda Once the lightning round and progress review are complete (usually no more than fifteen minutes into the meeting), now it is time to talk about the agenda. That’s right. Counter to conventional wisdom about meetings, the agenda for a weekly tactical should not be set before the meeting, but only after the lightning round and regular reporting activities have taken place.”
― Patrick Lencioni, Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business

“The single biggest structural problem facing leaders of meetings is the tendency to throw every type of issue that needs to be discussed into the same meeting, like a bad stew with too many random ingredients. Desperate to minimize wasted time, leaders decide that they will have one big staff meeting, either once a week or every other week. They sit down in a room for two or three or four hours and hash everything out—sales strategies, expense policies, potential mergers, employee recognition programs, budgets, and branding—so that everyone can get back to their “real work.”
― Patrick Lencioni, Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business

“The truth is, the only thing more painful than confronting an uncomfortable topic is pretending it doesn’t exist. And I believe far more suffering is caused by failing to deal with an issue directly—and whispering about it in the hallways—than by putting it on the table and wrestling with it head on.”
― Patrick Lencioni, Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business

“Avoiding the issues that merit debate and disagreement not only makes the meeting boring, it guarantees that the issues won’t be resolved. And this is a recipe for frustration. Ironically, that frustration often manifests itself later in the form of unproductive personal conflict, or politics.”
― Patrick Lencioni, Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business

“I think we need to start having a Headline News every day, for five minutes. We could call it a Daily Check-in or something. That means we should get together in a conference room, standing up, and just announce what we’re all doing.”
― Patrick Lencioni, Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business

“But no matter what is going on, there has to be something ultimately at stake. A prize, survival, sanity, success, even peace of mind.”
― Patrick Lencioni, Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business

“Conflict is nothing more than an anxious situation that needs to be resolved.”
― Patrick Lencioni, Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business

“Meetings are boring because they lack drama. Or conflict. This is a shame because most meetings have plenty of potential for drama, which is essential for keeping human beings engaged.”
― Patrick Lencioni, Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business

“when we fail to get clarity and alignment during meetings, we set in motion a colossal wave of human activity as executives and their direct reports scramble to figure out what everyone else is doing and why.”
― Patrick Lencioni, Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business

“While it is true that much of the time we currently spend in meetings is largely wasted, the solution is not to stop having meetings, but rather to make them better. Because when properly utilized, meetings are actually time savers. That’s right. Good meetings provide opportunities to improve execution by accelerating decision making and eliminating the need to revisit issues again and again. But they also produce a subtle but enormous benefit by reducing unnecessarily repetitive motion and communication in the organization.”
― Patrick Lencioni, Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business

“Ad Hoc Strategic Meetings In some cases, a strategic or critical issue that gets raised in a Weekly Tactical meeting cannot wait for the next Monthly Strategic meeting on the schedule. Still, that doesn’t mean it should be taken up during that Weekly Tactical.”
― Patrick Lencioni, Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business

“Meeting #3:The Monthly Strategic This is the most interesting and in many ways the most important type of meeting any team has. It is also the most fun. It is where executives wrestle with, analyze, debate, and decide upon critical issues (but only a few) that will affect the business in fundamental ways. Monthly Strategic meetings allow executives to dive into a given topic or two without the distractions of deadlines and tactical concerns.”
― Patrick Lencioni, Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business

“While these are both important problems to be aware of, by far the most common and dangerous challenge in making Weekly Tacticals work is the temptation to get into discussions about long-term strategic issues. Why is this such an important problem to avoid? First , there isn’t enough time during a Weekly Tactical to properly discuss major issues. Important, complex topics deserve enough time for brainstorming, analysis, even preparation.”
― Patrick Lencioni, Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business

“Progress Review The next key ingredient for the Weekly Tactical meeting is the routine reporting of critical information or metrics: revenue, expenses, customer satisfaction, inventory, and the like. What is reported depends on the particular industry and organizational situation, of course. The point here is to get into the habit of reviewing progress relating to key metrics for success, but not every metric available.”
― Patrick Lencioni, Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business

“The Lightning Round This is a quick, around-the-table reporting session in which everyone indicates their two or three priorities for the week. It should take each team member no more than one minute (yes, sixty seconds!) to quickly describe what is on their respective plates. So even a large team should be able to accomplish this in ten minutes or so. The lightning round is critical because it sets the tone for the rest of the meeting. By giving all participants a real sense of the actual activities taking place in the organization, it makes it easy for the team to identify potential redundancies, gaps, or other issues that require immediate attention.”
― Patrick Lencioni, Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business

“Weekly Tactical meeting should last between forty-five and ninety minutes, depending on its frequency, and should include a few critical elements, including the following:”
― Patrick Lencioni, Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business

“teams should commit to doing Daily Check-ins for a set period of time—perhaps two months—before evaluating whether or not they are working.”
― Patrick Lencioni, Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business

“The Daily Check-in requires that team members get together, standing up, for about five minutes every morning to report on their activities that day. Five minutes. Standing up. That’s it. The purpose of the Daily Check-in is to help team members avoid confusion about how priorities are translated into action on a regular basis. It provides a quick forum for ensuring that nothing falls through the cracks on a given day and that no one steps on anyone else’s toes. Just as important, it helps eliminate the need for unnecessary and time-consuming e-mail chains about schedule coordination.”
― Patrick Lencioni, Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business

“The key to injecting drama into a meeting lies in setting up the plot from the outset. Participants need to be jolted a little during the first ten minutes of a meeting, so that they understand and appreciate what is at stake.”
― Patrick Lencioni, Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business

“Now imagine if I were to ask a room full of executives which they enjoy more: meetings or movies? They would probably think I was joking. And yet, meetings should be more interesting than movies because they have more inherent potential for passion and engagement than movies do.”
― Patrick Lencioni, Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business

“Meetings are ineffective because they lack contextual structure. Too many organizations have only one kind of regular meeting, often called a staff meeting. Either once a week or twice a month, people get together for two or three hours of randomly focused discussion about everything from strategy to tactics, from administrivia to culture. Because there is no clarity around what topics are appropriate, there is no clear context for the various discussions that take place.”
― Patrick Lencioni, Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business

“Meetings are boring because they lack drama. Or conflict. This is a shame because most meetings have plenty of potential for drama, which is essential for keeping human beings engaged. Unfortunately, rather than mining for that golden conflict, most leaders of meetings seem to be focused on avoiding tension and ending their meetings on time.”
― Patrick Lencioni, Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business

“Second, and even more important, meetings are ineffective. The most justifiable reason to loathe meetings is that they don’t contribute to the success of our organizations.”
― Patrick Lencioni, Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business

“What is the real problem? Actually, there are two. First, meetings are boring. They are tedious, unengaging, and dry. Even if people had nothing else to do with their time, the monotony of sitting through an uninspired staff meeting, conference call, or two-day off-site would have to rank right up there with the most painful activities of modern business culture.”
― Patrick Lencioni, Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business

“And we have to stop focusing on agendas and minutes and rules, and accept the fact that bad meetings start with the attitudes and approaches of the people who lead and take part in them.”
― Patrick Lencioni, Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business

“The Quarterly Off-Site Review is a critical chance to step back from the daily, weekly, monthly grind, and review things from a distance.” “Review what?” For the first time, Will read directly from his notes. “Well, strategy. The competitive landscape. Morale. The dynamics of the executive team. Top performers. Bottom performers. Customer satisfaction. Pretty much everything that has a long-term impact on the success of the company. Stuff you just can’t cover in weekly or monthly meetings.”
― Patrick Lencioni, Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business