Patrick Lencioni, Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business. Jossey-Bass, 2004.
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Referenced in: Ministry Teams, General Resources
LifeandLeadership.com Summary
Lencioni argues there are two problems with regard to meetings. First, they are boring, tedious, un-engaging, and dry. Second, they are ineffective, often taking energy with little return.
They are boring because they lack drama, i.e. leaders do not look for legitimate reasons to provoke relevant, constructive, ideological conflict that keeps people engaged, leads to more passionate discussions, and ultimately better decisions. They are ineffective because they lack contextual structure. Most groups have one kind of meeting, perhaps a staff meeting, usually once a week, where they stay for several hours to discuss every topic, both the important and the unimportant.
With regard to drama, drama comes from hooking people into a healthy conflict as to what is at stake. He advocates “the provocation of drama and confrontation among team members to create interest during meetings. I am encouraging those who lead meetings, and participants to be miners of conflict.” Meetings need conflict, as it is the resolution of conflict that makes a meeting productive, engaging, and fun. The enemy is conflict avoidance that squashes issues that merit debate and disagreement, and which therefore insures the lack of resolution.
With regard to structure, Lencioni suggests having multiple types of meetings, with each targeted to specific topics, purposes, formats and timings. He proposes The 4 Meetings:
- Meeting #1 – The Daily Check-in where members get together, face-to-face, standing only (no sitting), for 5 minutes, to report on daily activities. This helps groups to keep the focus on priorities, insures that nothing is falling through the cracks, helps members not to step on each other’s toes in daily work, and eliminates the need for emails about schedules.
- Meeting #2 – The Weekly Tactical that focuses on issues of immediate concern. It should last 45-90 minutes. It should consist of three elements: 1) the lightning round where everyone gives a quick 1-minute report of their top 2-3 priorities for the week; 2) progress review where the group measures its progress against established metrics (see Five Dysfunctions of a Team for definition of metrics); and 3) real-time agenda, i.e. the agenda is not set before the meeting but should be based on what everyone is actually working toward the fulfillment of the organization’s goals.
- Meeting #3 – The Monthly Strategic where the leaders tackle a select number of critical issues. The length of the meeting depends upon the issues, but will not uncommonly demand a few hours per issue.
- Meeting #4 – The Quarterly Off-Site Review that looks at four topics: 1) Comprehensive reassessment of strategy to maintain its suitability to organizational mission and objectives; 2) Team review their behaviors as a team, identifying positive and negative trends and tendencies that may not be serving the organization; 3) Personnel review to discuss key employees toward retaining and encouraging top performers and coaching poor performers; and 4) Competitive industry review to spot trends where others are succeeding in areas where the organization is weak.
Lencioni discusses several inevitable challenges to the successful implementation of this meeting schedule, and suggests helpful remedies.
Like other Lencioni books, the applicability to ministry settings may be limited by the relative informality and lack of official authority structures, incentives, and controls that are found in corporate settings. It is still quite useful however, especially with the interplay of drama and structure, and the calendared rhythm of specially defined meetings.
From the Publisher
Casey McDaniel had never been so nervous in his life.
In just ten minutes, The Meeting, as it would forever be known, would begin. Casey had every reason to believe that his performance over the next two hours would determine the fate of his career, his financial future, and the company he had built from scratch.
“How could my life have unraveled so quickly?” he wondered.
In his latest page-turning work of business fiction, best-selling author Patrick Lencioni provides readers with another powerful and thought-provoking book, this one centered around a cure for the most painful yet underestimated problem of modern business: bad meetings. And what he suggests is both simple and revolutionary.
Casey McDaniel, the founder and CEO of Yip Software, is in the midst of a problem he created, but one he doesn’t know how to solve. And he doesn’t know where or who to turn to for advice. His staff can’t help him; they’re as dumbfounded as he is by their tortuous meetings.
Then an unlikely advisor, Will Peterson, enters Casey’s world. When he proposes an unconventional, even radical, approach to solving the meeting problem, Casey is just desperate enough to listen.
As in his other books, Lencioni provides a framework for his groundbreaking model, and makes it applicable to the real world. Death by Meeting is nothing short of a blueprint for leaders who want to eliminate waste and frustration among their teams, and create environments of engagement and passion.
About the Author
Patrick Lencioni is president of The Table Group, a San Francisco Bay Area management consulting firm, and author of the best-selling books The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive and The Five Temptations of a CEO. In addition to his work as an executive coach and consultant, Pat is a sought-after speaker. Prior to founding The Table Group, he worked at the management consulting firm Bain & Company, Oracle Corporation, and Sybase, where he was vice president of organizational development. He is on numerous advisory boards and sits on the National Board of Directors for the Make-A-Wish Foundation of America. Over the years, Pat has worked with hundreds of executive teams and CEOs—all struggling, at one time or another, with the potential for dysfunction among their teams.
Pat lives with his wife, Laura, and their twin boys, Matthew and Connor, in the San Francisco Bay Area. You can reach him at The Table Group’s web site, www.tablegroup.com, or at [email protected].
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