James King

Getting a team to the point where it really hums is hard, but once you have experienced a high performing team you never want to go back to being in a team that is ineffective, goalless or in a state of unhealthy conflict.

I have come to believe though, that high performing teams are not teams made up of individual high performers, nor even teams with the motivation and discipline to become an elite team. Rather, high performing teams are the ones that have found their balance together.

Everyone in the team holds each other accountable while recognising the foibles and short comings of each other as part of the deal and not a failing. They have a shared esprit de corps while allowing diversity and individual quirkiness. They focus on a shared goal but are also able to recognise when things are changing.

Another form of balance that the team needs to find for itself is the balance completing their core tasks, collaborating informally and spending time in structured collaboration.

I use “structured collaboration” as a euphemism for meetings, because meetings have a bad reputation and people constantly tell me that they do not like meetings.

Meetings seem to have the same reputation as the bad team member that appears in TV shows, but never stays in a high performing team for long.

In one tv show, a family was lost in space and were stuck with this guy called Dr Zachary Smith. The show was actually called “Lost in Space” but actually it could have been called “Why on earth is that guy still with you?”.

In every episode, Dr Smith would betray the family, make some appalling mistake that either nearly got them killed, or ruined their chance of getting home. In every episode people were furious with him and yet, in every single episode, they let him stay with them when he was not only a poor team player but literally the single greatest threat to the survival of the people in the team.

In the real world, in any team aspiring to be high performing, this buffoon would have been given a fair warning, fallen short of basic team expectations and then been asked to leave.

Other team members, the children in the show, made mistakes and got people into trouble, but the senior team members spent countless hours coaching them and helping them to learn safely. The children were actually very high performing space cadets because if their support.

Maybe in the real world our junior team members would not be fighting aliens, but in any team that aspires to be high performing, there actually is constant coaching, patient explanations and even dumb child-like mistakes.

But what on earth does Lost in Space have to do with meetings.

Well, just as it is hard to believe the Space Family Robinson tolerated a team member who imperilled their very lives, it seems hard to believe that people in a high performing team would tolerate meetings that sucked their energy live a space vampire in a corny science fiction show.

Team members who are finding their way get coaching and guidance, terrible team players who act against the team are moved on from the team, but terrible meetings seem to join the team for the next adventure every single episode.

In high performing teams, we spend time on performance management, helping our kids grow stronger and helping our Dr Smith’s learn to contribute or go onto a “PiP”.

Dr Smith would go onto a performance improvement plan after the first catastrophic act of sabotage, but painfully bad meetings just turn up and stay with the team.

If our team is to find its balance, then there is a place for good meetings. And if a team is on the journey to high performance, then it makes sense that some meetings are not as effective as we need them to be.

If that is the case, then should we not give them feedback to improve? Should we not give them a chance to contribute value to the team?

OK, meetings are not people, but when you think of it a meeting does not exist unless there are people there. So if the meeting exists then the people in the meeting should be able to give themselves feedback on the value and performance of the meeting. And if the people in the meeting decide to make the meeting a high performing one, then surely it will become one.

I estimate that most teams spend 10-20% of their time in meetings, so for a team of 5-10 people, that is the equivalent of 1 person. Just as each person is expected to contribute to success then, so should the team’s meetings.

If you have a really useful meeting then it must be doing something for the team, or at least their stakeholders. Team bonding must occur, or team planning must improve, or something must be better.

So if that is the case, then we should manage the performance of each meeting, just like we expect our team members to manage their own performance.

If we have a high performing meeting, we should give ourselves feedback on why it is so good and we should keep it going.

If we have a meeting that is getting there, but not fully performing, like the kids in Lost in Space, then we should coax it to improve and help it to become the effective meeting it is capable of becoming.

But if we have an obnoxious “Dr Smith” of a meeting that nobody likes and that interrupts our work, we should put it on a performance improvement plan.

If Dr Smith were in our team, we would start by setting clear expectations – “do help team members, do NOT work with aliens to try to kill us”. For a meeting we should do the same – “Do achieve this goal, do have action items or muffins and do not go for more than half an hour”, or something like that.

Then when the meeting falls short of our expectations we should set a clear improvement plan in place for it:

• We expected this –
• We actually got this –
• There is a gap here where –
• This cannot continue. We will agree to these steps –
• We will review progress at this point in time –
• If things improve, well done. If not, there will be this consequence –

For me, the consequence for a recalcitrant meeting that will not improve is that we kill it. I don’t think the Space Family Robinson would have killed Dr Smith, but if a meeting does not lift its game, I don’t think we have any moral imperative to let it keep coming back create more suffering. If we cannot get a meeting to work after putting in place an improvement plan, we should just leave it behind, kill it or remove it from all diaries.

Am I right, or should we just accept that our high performing teams will tolerate bad meetings, even if they actively undermine our mission to become high performing?