Dos and Don’ts from Death By Meetings

A fictional novel about meetings and the lessons learned. (4 min read)

Death By Meetings is a self-help novel. Yep, you read it right. It is a novel about meetings. 

When I started reading the book, it caught me by surprise. 80% of the book is a fable. A beautiful page-turner fable by the author, Patrick Lencioni. The best way I can describe it is that it's a concoction of an episode from The Office, Silicon Valley, and Lost. It’s interesting, wild, and plausibly realistic. The last 20% of the book extends the lessons from the fable. Lessons which can be applied to any workplace. Lessons we are interested in exploring.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading the fable and the learnings. The book is easy to read, very well written, and shares valuable lessons. But in my view, the book is not for everyone. It is an absolute must-read for the leaders in the role of senior managers and up. 

However, there are some golden nuggets of information that are useful to first-line managers. But before we explore those, let's review the overall summary of the book. And then we will pick a few of those nuggets and make them actionable for us.

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Death By Meetings highlights that the leaders should have:

• At least 4 different types of meetings:

  • Daily Check-ins (5 mins max)

  • Weekly Tactical (45-90 mins weekly/biweekly)

  • Monthly Strategic (2-3 hours)

  • Quarterly off-site. (1-2 days)

• Each type of meeting has different advantages and plays an important role in the leader’s organization. The first two types of meetings are tactical and the last two are strategic. Having different meetings prevents topics from crossing over and overloading each meeting with agendas. As a result, each meeting becomes more engaging and effective. 

• Each meeting has its own challenges as well. Their challenges are highlighted in the book along with the solutions.

• Conflict is a key ingredient to strategic meetings such as monthly strategic meetings and quarterly offsite. It is the leader's responsibility to encourage and facilitate members to engage in healthy conflict.

Note: I have intentionally omitted details in the summary points above. Merely writing them here without proper context will not be useful. Moreover, I truly believe that the author has written it better in the book.

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Now time for those golden nuggets for the first-line managers.

Do the following 3 meetings:

• A daily check-in or stand up a meeting: Meeting should be 5-15 minutes in length. It should be a quick status update meeting of what is being worked on and if there is anything blocking. This helps identify blockers fast.

• Weekly Tactical meeting or staff meeting: The book recommends to follow a 3 step process for an effective weekly staff meeting:

  • Lightning round: 1-minute update from everyone in the team on the current task. Similar to daily check-ins.

  • Progress Reviews round: Updates on current projects by leads, pass downs from upper management, housekeeping, and administrative tasks, etc.

  • Real-Time Agendas: Things that stood out from the lightning round and progress reviews round.

Also, the author suggests not to make an agenda pre-meeting. As per the book, the real-time agenda should be based on conversations during the meeting. I think this is true if this meeting is run at the Senior Manager level. 

However, in my experience, meetings at first-levels are greatly benefitted with an agenda. So I have expanded and slightly modified the above 3 steps approach to 4 steps. This additional step helps me run my meetings much more effectively. 

• My 4 step process for staff meeting:

  • Agenda highlights: I present agenda highlights. Things we are going to discuss in the meeting. This is similar to the agenda slide in presentations. This gives context to everyone on what's coming up in the meeting.

  • Lightning round: Maximum of 5-minute updates from everyone about their current work. 5 minutes because I have a small team. This can be scaled down to 1-minute per-person for bigger teams.

  • Passdowns and Team discussions: Things that I can share from upper management and topics that need entire team discussion.

  • Parking Lot Items: This is a minor version of real-time agendas. Anything new that comes up during the discussion is put in the parking lot and discussed as a team. 

• Quarterly Check-In Meeting: Meetings to go over the status of OKRs and track the key results. 

Don’ts:

• Daily standup/check-in meetings should not be detailed status updates. Ensure that each status update is not verbose and takes less than 1 minute.

• Monthly check-in meetings at tech companies are not a necessity for first-level teams. First-level teams don’t change strategy monthly. The execute. That’s why I think monthly strategy meetings can be skipped at the first-line team level.

• Don’t introduce conflicts in weekly tactical or staff meetings unless discussing topics from the parking lot. Keep the conflict for Quarterly check-in or planning meetings.

Above were the dos and don’ts that stood out to me. I have modified and applied them to my workplace. It has helped us save time on a bunch of unnecessary meetings. I hope you can directly apply these to your workplace as well. If you do and find them useful, please share this post with your colleagues and save them from the Death By Meetings.