Celebrate Your Bad Meetings
How do you define a good meeting? If it is just getting the other dudes to "say yes" or making the sale at all costs, you might be doing longer term damage to your business goals. Perhaps it's time to embrace and celebrate "bad" meetings.
Well, at least that's the contention of Dan Burrier in the Harvard Business Review. In it, Burrier asserts that "very often, it is disagreement, discomfort, "no," and a complete lack of classic salesmanship that truly moves the ball forward." As a result, he suggests making room for bad meetings in your tactical plans.
What does he mean by this? Success isn't just about the meeting, because we're not paid to have good meetings -- the meeting is a means to an end. If you make the sale but do it in a way that compromises your long-term business relationship, that's not success. But if you come out of a meeting that generated disagreement and discomfort -- but it eventually gets you closer to your business goals -- that is a reason to celebrate.
To that end, Burrier has five suggestions for honing your meetings:
- Celebrate meetings in which you can measure success -- sales, agreements, etc -- only if the ball actually moves forward.
- Celebrate "bad" meetings in which people disagree and nothing appears to get agreed on or accomplished. Sometimes success takes more than a single meeting.
- Disinvite people who want to attend your meeting but who are there only because of a sense of entitlement or organizational territorialism.
- Clearly define the purpose of the meeting both in the meeting agenda on the day of the meeting and in the original invite. That will help ensure the right people attend and the wrong people don't.
- Remember that real success is iterative. You can't move mountains in a single meeting, and if it looks like that's what happened, it's probably too good to be true.