Meeting Shifting: How The World’s Top 15% Of Teams Unlock Faster And Bolder Collaboration—and Cut Wasteful Meetings

Let's imagine a leadership team meeting with a cost-cutting proposal on the agenda from the Chief Information Officer to increase centralization of shared IT resources. The CIO and their team have prepped the cost efficiencies after a request from the CEO and the Chief Financial Officer. At the meeting, the CIO presents the proposals to frame a discussion. But they have already pre-sold the package to the CFO and brought up many of the likely challenges with the CEO and asked both for their backing before even coming into the room because they expect pushback from business unit leaders against the idea of more central control of IT and loss of customized attention. The CIO’s presentation is a standard report out. Some of the business unit leaders can tell this has already been politically stitched-up with the CFO and CEO and decide not to express their discontent, risks or concerns. Some individuals have clicked into listen mode, don’t believe they really have a dog in the hunt, nor would it matter if they did say anything. Some are unwilling to make recommendations even though their gut tells them there is a better way to do this. Of the 12 people in the room, only four voices are heard. Real candor is noticeably absent. There’s an unspoken belief that it’s best to move to the next agenda item, for now, and try to deal with this outside the meeting. Welcome to an everyday meeting in corporate life anywhere in the world today.

A high return practice of world-class teams

Let me lay out a different scenario. Not an imaginary scenario, but one that happens in the top 15% of truly world-class teams who don’t believe that meetings are the only way to collaborate, and they happen to be the digital native disruptors of most industries who, since school, used the google collaboration software and naturally carried these tools like Google Docs into their early professional life and created collaboration processes that fully leveraged such tools.

In this second scenario, the CEO has framed a north-star understanding that under the current economic climate, there are cost constraints and a need to identify cost reductions. The CIO, in response, creates a quick one-pager in the following format:

• Here's what we know and have done already.
• Here's where we're struggling and there are challenges and knotty issues on this topic.
• Here's our plan for going forward as it stands today.

The one-pager is shared either in the form of a simple narrative document, or slide. And it could be accompanied by a simple 10 minute video sent in advance. In all cases, the one-pager is accompanied by a group editable spreadsheet with all 12 executive team meeting attendees named in the left-hand column. Along the top row, there are three simple questions for each member of the team to answer:

1. What challenges do you see that we're missing?
2. What innovative/bold ideas or solutions do you have that could benefit the situation?
3. What help or support can you and your team provide to address this?

This is sent out at least a week before the meeting for all teammates to read, giving every contributor serious time to think, consult their teams, and answer those questions before the meeting… and then to read each other's answers. Knowing that in the past, preparatory work before meetings was often not done, use of assigned names on a shared document increases the likelihood of completion because of open accountability among peers with the visibility of the CEO. What we've just done, is Meeting Shifted. There is now a cycle of thinking, dialogue and collaboration—in a shared sheet, a format that everyone can see—prior to the meeting. This, the level of collaboration prior to the meeting has a number of key attributes:

1. We've created something that didn't exist in the meeting: instead of four people feeling they're fully heard in the meeting, every single individual had a chance to put their full voice into the question at hand: 100% of everyone's point of view is on the table.
2. The willingness to be courageous and speak up increases in written assignments versus a room full of people. It takes a fairly courageous individual to have a strong voice in the face of potential opposition. Whereas the assignment in the shared sheet grants the permission to be bold and creates more of a challenge culture. In a sense, we are taking the culture we all wish we had in meetings and we're assigning it a Meeting Shifting exercise.
3. Everyone has the opportunity to be more thoughtful. Some people naturally think on their feet and excel in meetings. Many people prefer to be more contemplative and take time to be reflective and thorough in their thinking; Meeting Shifting fully taps the talent of this group.
4. Inclusion. People can involve their teams. In fact, one could suggest to any of the 12 that if they feel that there is somebody whose point of view would be missed they can send this document along to them, and let them add their name and let them fill it out as well. When we do this, often, the number of collaborators can rise from 12 to 30 individuals and two or three multiple layers in the organization can have equal voice to a critical topic that they're actually closer to understanding than the original We often find that the most innovative breakthrough ideas actually come from individuals who would have never been in the meeting in the first place.

Psychological safety goes up, bolder inputs begin to occur. More importantly, the CIO, witnessing all of this valuable input of challenges and insights and offers of support or help, can recraft the agenda for the meeting that will follow to address the most important dissent that exists among the team or just quickly to land the plane on the critical issues. Rather than two or three rounds of meetings where only four people would have been heard, we have built an entirely more efficient round of collaboration. There is no place for sidebar and shadow conversations lobbying behind the scenes. There’s no lack of transparency. We know that without Meeting Shifting, eventually, the decision would have been made without everybody having full information as to why and the level of buy-in would be significantly lower. In this instance, buy-in is directly proportionate to co-creation, not just for the sake of the patina of getting people involved. The aperture for new ideas is truly being opened up, and everybody has transparency and full information as to why we came to certain conclusions. Finally, we can recognize that not everybody even has to be in this particular meeting. Clearly, when we see everyone's input, we can easily see that certain individuals are just not needed for this conversation, decreasing unnecessary meetings for many. We could find that there is a vital component of this conversation that should happen in the upcoming meeting of 12—and then there are other components that need much smaller groups of individuals to finalize.

Faster, bolder, inclusive decision-making—and fewer meetings

What we’ve done is significantly shorten the cycle time of collaboration and getting to the answer. By virtue of having everybody's input, we have not abdicated the responsibility or authority of the CIO, nor diminished the authority of the CFO and the CEO to make the final decision. Decision-making hasn't changed. What we've done is we've opened a much more transparent, bolder, inclusive process that would achieve faster decisions with better, bolder information. This also allows us to reduce our meetings by 30%, which we have seen repeatedly in our research.

This simple practice of shifting collaboration from traditional meeting practices to an asynchronous practice is a critical step on a team's journey to becoming what our research calls world-class hybrid. Our dataset of thousands of teams compiled over decades of working with Fortune 500 businesses, fast-growing unicorns and global brands shows that only 15% approach levels four and five on our five-point hybrid index for leveraging the most innovative practices for collaboration, and decision-making, and innovation. They recognize that the belief that collaboration must start with a meeting is a myth. They also know it's a myth that the broader you get people’s involvement, it thins down and creates consensus and mushy outputs. Those are the myths of old meeting strategies. It’s not the truth of today's powerful best practices for world-class hybrid teams, leveraging the best tools that have been available to us for years.

Introducing The Collaboration Stack

World-class teams recognize that collaboration happens in a stack and they become uniquely capable of working up and down that Collaboration Stack. The Collaboration Stack has the team starting with asynchronous work then moving to leveraging practices best suited for remote/hybrid meeting efficacy, and then in-person meetings. Each stage of the stack requires its own best practices (describing them all is beyond the scope of this article, but will be covered in my next book). But there's an entire set of asynchronous practices that are incredibly powerful and valuable of which Meeting Shifting, is just one simple example.

When we deal with remote business practices, we show the value of remote/hybrid meetings for transparent sidebar conversations in the chat function and the use of breakout rooms, which also increase psychological safety significantly. Opening a shared document in those breakout rooms allow us to capture insight from everybody in the room, improving the perspective and sense of inclusion and engagement. Unfortunately, most teams moved from boardrooms pre-pandemic into remote meetings that looked exactly like the meeting style of a boardroom. And now we're crawling back into those boardrooms with the same meeting and collaboration structures we always did, fully missing how to leverage valuable collaboration tools. What's even sadder is the recognition that now that we are back in the office, we've dragged people in with resentment to being in the office. They're sitting still alone in cubes on remote and hybrid meetings that they feel they could have done equally as well from home and still been able to eliminate the commute. Organizations have been real estate baiting with better food to get people back to the office to “earn the commute.” In reality, we need to change the way we work so that we engineer when we are together in person, for the most powerful things that we should be doing: wrestling gritty issues, eye to eye, celebrating, playing, serving, bonding, connecting—things on the emotional spectrum should be reserved for the physical times we're collaborating together.

Awakening to faster bolder collaboration

This awakening to faster and bolder ways of collaboration is despite the great laboratory we all had to test remote work during the pandemic when too many of us barely scratched the surface. Our research institute has been studying the field of remote and hybrid work since 2010 and published a series of articles in Harvard Business Review. The lessons and best practices were laid out like a buffet to us if only we were just more curious. These are the ways of working the unicorn companies that are disrupting business models and disrupting ways of working and have been for some time, and it's available to anybody. We ignore them at our peril.