Smaller meetings are more productive than larger meetings

Large meetings will be a waste of time for at least some of the people in the meeting

Boredom. Soul crushing boredom. Eyes glazed over. People daydreaming. People surreptitiously looking at their phones. This is your typical large meeting.

Gather twenty people in a room and at least ten of them will be bored. They will have nothing to contribute. The discussion barely involves them. Why are they there? You could have had the meeting, made the decision, and then sent out an email with an announcement.

Imagine if you only met with the one or two most important people, necessary to make a decision? Imagine if everyone else was allowed to go on doing their regular work, undisturbed?

How small a meeting is perfect? This is a pragmatic issue, we should not build a cult around some specific number, as others have. We only say that smaller is better.

Back in the 1980s, when he was President of Intel, Andy Grove wrote a book called High Output Management, and he went into some detail about the importance of one-on-one meetings, which for him were a regular practice during which the people reporting to him (or others) could come in and talk about any subject. His book gave rise to a new management fad.

Some people love Grove’s book whereas others feel he took simple concepts and made them sound overly complicated. I’m in the latter group. That’s especially true when it comes to one-on-one meetings. I don’t think it is wise to build a cult around this, or any, management practice. As a counter-point, Jeff Bezos, for Amazon.com, dispensed with this kind of regular one-on-one. Bezos felt that senior level executives would mostly waste time trying to blame one another for various problems. Bezos felt that all meetings should be goal-oriented, rather than open-ended.

What I am instead advocating is that you, personally, should consider the benefits of very small meetings, containing just one or two people, besides yourself. When you need specific information, just invite the people who can give you that information, and when you need to give information to one person, meet with just that one person.

When I need to announce something to a large group, I can send an email to everyone, or send a message to a whole channel on Slack, or send a group text on WhatsApp — I’m lucky to have an abundance of options nowadays. I don’t need to get them all together in a room.

Spotify.com is a remote-first company, and they have optimized their processes to enable remote-work. Towards that goal, they wrote an app that goes through everyone’s calendar on January 1^st and deletes any recurring meeting that has more than three people listed as attendees. Thus Spotify encourages managers to keep meetings to three people or less.

In his book Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Peter Drucker tells the story of a business leader who would invite all of his direct reports to each meeting. The business leader felt he was being magnanimous, liberal, generous, and democratic, inviting everyone in. Much to his surprise, when he eventually had to cancel some of the meetings, his direct reports were grateful. When he asked why, they told him the meetings were a distraction which took them away from their real work.

When I worked at SS&C it was common to set up once-a-week meetings with multiple teams invited. As many as 75 people would be invited. It was also common for the most important executives to be invited to four or five meetings, all happening simultaneously. So of course, the key people would treat these meetings as optional. So 20 people might show up, but they would be all of the interns and the newly hired and the low level assistants, and meanwhile the people with the power to make decisions were absent. A complete waste of time. Where it was possible, I got these meetings canceled forever, and campaigned against the existence of such meetings, but this style of management is pervasive throughout corporate America. There is something about the centrality of a calendar, such as the Microsoft Teams’ calendar, and the ease of inviting people to online meetings, that encourages the creation of these monster meetings. Lazy, unthinking, and stupid, some people create meetings and send the invites to multiple team-lists. But to be productive, the opposite is needed: careful thought about the specific individuals who you need to talk to.