Meetings are the lifeblood of an organization—they are central to its success but are also often seemingly useless and too long. This presents a paradox—how can you make meetings more productive when your staff views them as pointless? The answer is to make meetings better. Death By Meeting provides a roadmap to do so.
Author Patrick Lencioni illustrates how to make meetings more engaging and productive through the parable of Casey, a golf pro turned software developer who runs a sports gaming company called Yip Software. He’s a smart guy and generally a good boss, but he runs boring, unfocused meetings that deplete team morale. When he sells his company to become a subsidiary of a larger gaming company called Playsoft, a Playsoft executive named J.T. begins to attend Casey’s meetings and is shocked by the team’s lack of passion and urgency. It’s like they’re talking about a case study in business school rather than the future of their own company.
J.T. communicates to Casey that his job is at risk if he can’t focus his meetings better. Fearing for his livelihood, Casey huddles with his precocious assistant Will and devises a strategy to have more meetings and to fill them with movie-like drama. Just like in the movies, meetings have to have a hook—a good beginning that leaves participants willing to digest necessary plot exposition that might be a little slower. Consider discussing a budget: It sounds boring. But if you set it up correctly—by explaining the stakes in the line items and the competitors breathing down the company’s neck—people will be more willing to engage.
When J.T. returns to Yip to attend another meeting, he’s impressed by the transformation. Not only does Casey keep his job, but he makes his company more efficient and raises morale.
Casey isn’t the only executive who struggles to run productive meetings and engage his team. There are three significant issues with most meetings: A lack of drama, a lack of structure, and a lack of frequency.
Meetings are tedious. Given that most people sitting through meetings have other work that they could be doing, this is a huge issue, and it makes most employees resent meetings as a waste of their time. Meetings are tedious because there is no drama or tension within most meetings. In fact, most meeting leaders skirt tension if it exists.
To solve this problem, actively look for disagreement or drama. This keeps meeting participants engaged and leads to important strategic discussions. If two people have a disagreement, backed up by data, it’s helpful for everyone to hear it, because it engages them and helps them form their own opinions about the company’s decisions.
Think about a great screenplay. Screenwriters develop conflict and resolution over two hours. There are different kinds of conflict—from man versus a system in a movie like A Few Good Men to man versus nature, an unseen enemy, and himself in Apocalypse Now. Like movies, meetings often last two hours, but they lack everything that makes movies enjoyable, when in fact, meetings should be more fun than watching a movie.
In every good movie, conflict starts within the first ten minutes. This is called the “hook”—it’s what draws people into the movie and makes them want to keep watching. A good meeting works the same way. A hook can take many forms, but it should explain the stakes. As the meeting leader, explain that the company is under threat, or that it’s struggling to make a dent in a new market, or that a bad decision could lead to these problems. Or, if you don’t want to start on a negative note, explain how a good decision could make life better for employees, clients, or the world.
Employees need a reason to care. Finding a hook is easy, because as we’ve illustrated, meetings do matter. They decide the direction of a company.
After you’ve explained the stakes, look for disagreement. If there’s a group of reasonably smart people discussing an issue that they all care about (because of the hook), they’ll disagree on at least a small part of it. If you hear disagreement or even see on someone’s face that they’re unhappy with what’s going on, explore that. While people are often conflict-avoidant, when they do address an issue, they’ll almost always feel better, even if the ultimate decision doesn’t go their way.
Tell the team that you want conflict in meetings. However, people may still feel uncomfortable attacking their colleagues whom they respect. As a meeting leader, remind the team that what they’re doing is positive. Just a little bit of positive reinforcement goes a long way toward resolving tensions that could otherwise become personal and encouraging participants to have different opinions.
Meetings are unproductive. They don’t yield any results that make people’s jobs easier or help the company make a big decision, so again, employees begin to resent them. This is because meetings are unfocused. People talk about various issues that don’t relate to one another. Most issues get short shrift while the team discusses others for far too long.
Usually, meetings work as follows. The boss schedules them for two hours. Before the meeting, the leader sends out a disparate agenda that includes somewhere between four and seven items to discuss. She solicits feedback on the agenda but gets none. The first couple topics (not necessarily the most important) take up the lion’s share of the two hours, and the team rushes through the rest. The team makes no decisions and everyone leaves disappointed and defeated, if not outright angry.
Think of these meetings like a stew filled with leftovers. The team chucks everything into the pot, without much regard or care for what’s going in. Because the meetings are inefficient, the leader attempts to schedule fewer of them, which makes them even more inefficient. The team discusses everything all at once.
To solve problem two, leaders need to develop multiple types of meetings, with different purposes, formats, and uses. There are four different types of meetings.
This is the shortest meeting. It happens for five minutes at the beginning of each workday and is purely logistical: Who is here, who isn’t, and what everyone is working on today. Often, at the beginning of implementation, team members don’t find this meeting important, because it’s so fast. But it is an essential building block to better and more efficient communication—make sure it’s clear that this meeting is required.
Never cancel the meeting and keep it to five minutes at most. Don’t address anything beyond simple logistics here—other, larger problems can wait for the other meetings. People don’t even need to sit down for the check-in.
This meeting happens every week or every other week and lasts for around an hour. 45 minutes is a shorter tactical and 90 minutes is a longer one. It starts with everyone taking turns explaining, in under a minute, what they’re working on. After everyone knows what’s going on with everyone else, you and anyone you deputize gives updates on some larger logistical issues—how the budget looks, whether the team is hitting their sales goals, what the team is spending on advertising, and on from there.
Only then does the team create an agenda—this way, the agenda is based on what is actually going on at the company as reported by everyone involved. Address short term tactical challenges at this meeting, like whether to increase advertising for the month or whether to hire someone new. This meeting is meant to resolve and clarify short term obstacles to the company.
These tactical meetings don’t get into long-term strategic questions. Those are reserved for the next meeting.
This meeting is about large-scale strategies decisions. It happens every month or so and lasts anywhere from two to four hours. Sometimes, the timeline can change if a big strategic decision must happen right away. In this case, you can call an ad hoc strategic meeting. In both the ad hoc and the regular strategic meeting, though, this meeting is the one that will likely involve the most conflict and the one that can thus be the most fun.
Only the most salient questions are at issue in the strategic meeting—limit the agenda to two to three big questions. A lot of strategic questions will likely come up in the weekly tactical meetings, such as whether to expand into a new market or who advertisements are targeting, but prioritize the strategic questions they deem most important.
Additionally, everyone must come prepared with research. Conflicts, as previously discussed, are the lifeblood of these meetings, but if people arguing with one another don’t have data to back up their points, the conflict isn’t productive.
The final meeting is the review, which takes place about once a quarter off-site. Many companies do corporate retreats already, but these can function much better. They shouldn’t just function as a getaway. Rather, they involve long, important discussions about the direction of the business.
First, executives consider the direction of the company. They’ll review their strategic meetings and ask if their decision-making process has led to positive outcomes. They can also think about new challenges to their industry. This is where executives can get together and discuss the direction of their business or a new competitor eating into their market share in depth. Additionally, executives should assess their own performance and the performance of important employees.
These meetings aren’t too structured—the team can go into the off-site review with a basic understanding of some topics that they want to cover, but they don’t need a comprehensive agenda or a cutoff point. They don’t need hours of PowerPoints that often dominate these sessions. Finally, don’t include outsiders, like the family of the participants. It might seem fun to socialize, but this changes how the team interacts with one another, which is counterproductive to success.
In general, if there are too few meetings, executives spend most of their time answering questions about logistics. In a big company, this can entirely consume an executive’s day. So these four types of meetings can actually significantly reduce meeting-like logistical activity during the rest of the day. If everyone gets on the same page, things will run much more smoothly.
Meetings are the lifeblood of an organization—they are central to its success but are also often seemingly useless and too long. This presents a paradox—how should companies move forward with critical meetings that the staff see as pointless? The answer is to make meetings better. Death By Meeting provides a roadmap to do so and a parable that explains exactly why this task is so important.
Death By Meeting is organized into two sections. The first part of the book tells the story of a bad boss, his employees, and how he operates both among them and in the larger world of business. The story includes lessons about managing people and conducting meetings. The second part of the book is a condensed list of prescriptions for management success.
(Shortform note: We’ve flipped the book’s two-part structure to put the principles before the parable.)
There are three significant issues with most meetings: A lack of drama, a lack of structure, and a lack of frequency.
Meetings are tedious. Given that most people sitting through meetings have other work that they could be doing, this is a huge issue, and it makes most employees resent meetings as a waste of their time. Meetings are tedious because there is no drama or tension within most meetings. In fact, most meeting leaders skirt tension if it exists.
To solve this problem, actively look for disagreement or drama. This keeps meeting participants engaged and leads to important strategic discussions. If two people have a disagreement, backed up by data, it’s helpful for everyone to hear it, because it engages them and helps them form their own opinions about the company’s decisions.
Think about a great screenplay. Screenwriters develop conflict and resolution over two hours. There are different kinds of conflict—from man versus a system in a movie like A Few Good Men to man versus nature, an unseen enemy, and himself in Apocalypse Now. Like movies, meetings often last two hours, but they lack everything that makes movies enjoyable, when in fact, meetings should be more fun than watching a movie.
In every good movie, conflict starts within the first ten minutes. This is called the “hook”—it’s what draws people into the movie and makes them want to keep watching. A good meeting works the same way. A hook can take many forms, but it should explain the stakes. As the meeting leader, explain that the company is under threat, or that it’s struggling to make a dent in a new market, or that a bad decision could lead to these problems. Or, if you don’t want to start on a negative note, explain how a good decision could make life better for employees, clients, or the world.
Employees need a reason to care. Finding a hook is easy, because as we’ve illustrated, meetings do matter. They decide the direction of a company.
After you’ve explained the stakes, look for disagreement. If there’s a group of reasonably smart people discussing an issue that they all care about (because of the hook), they’ll disagree on at least a small part of it. If you hear disagreement, or even see on someone’s face that they’re unhappy with what’s going on, explore that. While people are often conflict-avoidant, when they do address an issue, they’ll almost always feel better, even if the ultimate decision doesn’t go their way.
Tell the team that you want conflict in meetings. However, people may still feel uncomfortable attacking their colleagues whom they respect. As a meeting leader, remind the team that what they’re doing is positive. Just a little bit of positive reinforcement goes a long way toward resolving tensions that could otherwise become personal and encouraging participants to have different opinions.
Meetings are unproductive. They don’t yield any results that make people’s jobs easier or help the company make a big decision, so again, employees begin to resent them. This is because meetings are unfocused. People talk about various issues that don’t relate to one another. Most issues get short shrift while the team discusses others for far too long.
Usually, meetings work as follows. The boss schedules them for two hours. Before the meeting, the leader sends out a disparate agenda that includes somewhere between four and seven items to discuss. She solicits feedback on the agenda but gets none. The first couple of topics (not necessarily the most important) take up the lion’s share of the two hours, and the team rushes through the rest. The team makes no decisions and everyone leaves disappointed and defeated, if not outright angry.
Think of these meetings like a stew filled with leftovers. The team chucks everything into the pot, without much regard or care for what’s going in there. Because the meetings are inefficient, the leader attempts to schedule fewer of them, which makes them even more inefficient. The team discusses everything all at once.
To solve problem two, leaders need to develop multiple types of meetings, with different purposes, formats, and uses. There are four different types of meetings.
This is the shortest meeting. It happens for five minutes at the beginning of each workday and is purely logistical: Who is here, who isn’t, and what everyone is working on today. Often, at the beginning of implementation, team members don’t find this meeting important, because it’s so fast. But it is an essential building block to better and more efficient communication—make sure it’s clear that this meeting is required.
Never cancel the meeting and keep it to five minutes at most. Don’t address anything beyond simple logistics here—other, larger problems can wait for the other meetings. People don’t even need to sit down for the check-in.
This meeting happens every week or every other week and lasts for around an hour. 45 minutes is a shorter tactical and 90 minutes is a longer one. It starts with everyone going around and explaining, in under a minute, what they’re working on. After everyone knows what’s going on with everyone else, you and anyone you deputize gives updates on some larger logistical issues—how does the budget look, is the team hitting their sales goals, what is the team spending on advertising, and on from there.
Only then does the team create an agenda—this way, the agenda is based on what is actually going on at the company as reported by everyone involved. Address short term tactical challenges at this meeting, like whether to increase advertising for the month or whether to hire someone new. This meeting is meant to resolve and clarify short term obstacles to the company.
These tactical meetings don’t get into long-term strategic questions. Those are reserved for the next meeting.
This meeting is about large-scale strategies decisions. It happens every month or so and lasts anywhere from two to four hours. Sometimes, the timeline can change if a big strategic decision must happen right away. In this case, you can call an ad hoc strategic meeting. In both the ad hoc and the regular strategic meeting, though, this meeting is the one that will likely involve the most conflict and the one that can thus be the most fun.
Only the most salient questions are at issue in the strategic meeting—limit the agenda to two to three big questions. A lot of strategic questions will likely come up in the weekly tactical meetings, such as whether to expand into a new market or who advertisements are targeting, but prioritize the strategic questions they deem most important.
Additionally, everyone must come prepared with research. Conflicts, as previously discussed, are the lifeblood of these meetings, but if people arguing with one another don’t have data to back up their points, the conflict isn’t productive.
The final meeting is the review, which takes place about once a quarter off-site. Many companies do corporate retreats already, but these can function much better. They shouldn’t just function as a getaway. Rather, they involve long, important discussions about the direction of the business.
First, executives consider the direction of the company. They’ll review their strategic meetings and ask if their decision-making process has led to positive outcomes. They can also think about new challenges to their industry. This is where executives can get together and discuss the direction of their business or a new competitor eating into their market share in depth. Additionally, executives should assess their own performance and the performance of important employees.
These meetings aren’t too structured—the team can go into the off-site review with a basic understanding of some topics that they want to cover, but they don’t need a comprehensive agenda or a cutoff point. They don’t need hours of PowerPoints that often dominate these sessions. Finally, don’t include outsiders, like the family of the participants. It might seem fun to socialize, but this changes how the team interacts with one another, which is counterproductive to success.
In general, if there are too few meetings, executives spend most of their time answering questions about logistics. In a big company, this can entirely consume an executive’s day. So these four types of meetings can actually significantly reduce meeting-like logistical activity during the rest of the day. If everyone gets on the same page, things will run much more smoothly.
This exercise will help you apply these principles to your own meetings.
Think about your workplace. What would the contents of a good check-in (quick 5-minute) meeting be?
What about a good tactical (weekly, hour-long) meeting?
What topics should you cover in a good strategic (biweekly, two hours long) meeting?
And finally, what topics should you go over in your review (quarterly, off-site) meeting?
The following parable shows how essential following the principles of running a good meeting is. At the end of each section, we’ll briefly review lessons learned.
Casey has a lovely wife and kids, he’s a good neighbor, and he’s a regular churchgoer. He’s an easy person to respect, and his employees like him as a person—they just don’t like him as a boss.
Casey grew up caddying and playing at a golf course near his home in Monterey, California. He loved the game, and he went to college on a golf scholarship, where he continued to excel at golf. He also studied engineering and computer science.
After college, he continued pursuing his dream to make the PGA tour, earning money playing pro golf. But, as he was finally starting to break through in big tournaments, he got the yips—everything was fine with him physically, but psychologically, he stopped being able to put.
His dreams of a pro golf career over, Casey went home to Monterey and married, bought a small house with his savings, and decided to play to his strengths and launch a realistic golf video game. This combined his interest in computer science with his interest in golfing. He named his company Yip Software.
After two years of work on his first game with two programmers, Yip released it. Because Casey knew so much about the sport, they were able to launch a realistic game, and golfers loved it. One of Casey’s friends on the PGA tour mentioned that Yip had helped his golf game in a press conference after he won a tournament. This made Yip relevant and led the company to sustained commercial success.
Casey hired 12 employees and opened an office, and he continued to expand in the years following. By the time the company turned 10, Yip had eight games on the market involving different sports, all with the same exactitude that made the first one a success. He also had 200 employees. While Yip was growing, Casey and his wife Patricia had four kids.
Unfortunately, despite all of this apparent success, it was clear to anyone who watched closely that Yip could have been twice as successful if it had a better CEO. Casey was good at spotting what customers wanted and had a clear understanding of the market. However, he didn’t care that much about winning big—he was happy if the company had a small margin and he could play golf occasionally.
It was especially clear that the company was lethargic from attending just one meeting. The Yip team knew their meetings were boring and unfocused, but they decided that it was just part of their business and they didn’t do anything about it. This was part of a larger problem of malaise. No one wanted to stay late, work weekends, or ever discuss work outside of the hours of 9 to 5. Everyone would get modest raises each year, and everyone felt comfortable.
When employees did get out of the office to go to work-related conferences, they saw a passion that was nowhere to be found at Yip. But employees rarely left. The CEO was a nice guy, and there weren’t that many jobs out there like theirs.
The problems became even clearer when Yip hired a new VP of Human Resources. She began by surveying the entire company on job performance, morale, and a host of other topics, and she found that morale in particular was low. She presented this information to executives at Yip, who became worried. They had known the issue was there, but they could ignore it as long as they didn’t have data to back it up. Now, they no longer had that luxury, and everyone started talking about the problem.
The team started to question this and much of the rest of the way the company functioned. For example, partly because he was raising a family, Casey made the decision not to build violent, fantasy games aimed at kids. He stuck to sports, even though the market for these other games was growing much more quickly than the market for sports games.
The head of product development thought that they should focus more on the quality of their existing products than add new features. The VP of sales asked if they could reconsider their decision to stick with sports games, especially given that fantasy games had the biggest growth market. Casey said that people needed a new challenge to rally around. The CFO, Tim, argued that people wanted better financial incentives. And the head of marketing just joked that he had accepted his fate that his work is boring.
Casey was most upset by the suggestion that people’s financials weren’t any good. He was proud of being a jobs creator and helping to put the roof over his employees’ heads. He fixated on this issue until he finally announced that he planned to take the company public.
Casey and Tim started to take meetings to prepare for their Initial Public Offering (IPO). Word got around, and Casey got a call from a VP named J.T. at Playsoft Games, one of the biggest gaming companies in the country. They wanted to buy Yip outright and increase their sports gaming portfolio. Casey agreed, but he had conditions:
Playsoft agreed and they closed the deal. Casey’s employees got stock in Playsoft, which they could sell after six months. Yip employees were excited. Their day-to-day hadn’t changed, but they had new wealth in stock.
However, almost as soon as the acquisition was made, Playsoft stock took a tailspin. All the employees who had been ecstatic were devastated. Casey thought that J.T. would be apologetic, but instead, he asked to start sitting in on some Yip meetings.
Even though Playsoft had promised Casey total control, they owned Yip, and the market was in a nosedive. So J.T. started coming to Casey’s meetings. They had their meetings like always—they passed out agendas, went around the room and discussed expenses for a long time, and then moved on to strategy. The strategy discussion didn’t impress J.T. The Yip employees didn’t seem concerned about their company’s future—it was like they were talking about a case study in business school. Finally, they moved on to discussions on advertising topics that had actionables attached, but at that point, there was not much time left in the meeting, and this issue got short shrift. They didn’t get to some of the other items on the original agenda at all.
J.T. was shocked. Everyone in the room was good at their jobs. But they had just had a useless meeting, and none of them seemed annoyed about it. They were all so used to these kinds of meetings that they weren’t phased by the waste of time. Casey would make good decisions in his office, as would other executives, but the meetings belied Yip’s success.
Plus, the meetings were rarely attended by all the executives. Because they were useless, executives would find excuses to miss them. This was the root of the morale issue at Yip.
So J.T.—whose team at Playsoft was in charge of acquisitions, consistently worked weekends, and never complained (out of fear of J.T. or otherwise)—decided to set up a series of sessions with Casey. Casey was angry and nervous about this, and his frustrations compounded when his assistant let him know that she was pregnant and would have to leave in a couple of weeks.
An old friend recommended a new assistant—his son Will, who had just gotten out of graduate school for film, had studied psychology and business as an undergrad, and was brilliant at solving problems. He needed to make some money at a day job before trying to make it in Hollywood. Casey agreed to speak to Will about the job.
Consider how often you’re annoyed by something happening in your workplace. This exercise will help you articulate why some activities annoy you.
Reflect on your typical meetings at work. How do they function?
Compare your meetings to Casey’s meetings. What’s the same, what’s different?
How could a leader improve the meetings in your workplace and Casey’s meetings?
When Will came into the office, it was clear immediately that he had a magnetic personality. He was gregarious but also seemed kind and curious about the job. Casey knew right away that he would hire him.
Will felt comfortable enough in the interview, especially given that he was overqualified for the position, to ask about Playsoft and the scrutiny that Yip was under. Casey immediately understood that Will’s qualifications and his curiosity would be an asset during a difficult time for the company. So Casey told Will that he could help out with tasks and strategy that aren’t usually part of an administrative assistant’s job.
Unfortunately, Will was not entirely forthcoming about his background. As a child, Will had often blurted out inappropriate and rude remarks to people. This made it difficult for his teachers to like him and got him into scuffles with other kids frequently. He was diagnosed in high school as having a mild case of OCD and Tourette’s Syndrome. He started taking medication and seeing a therapist and his symptoms went away quickly.
However, after leaving grad school, Will decided to stop taking his medication. And his old symptoms came back.
Casey decided that he would confide in Will about the full extent of the problems that he was having. Casey believed that J.T. was angling to take his job and told Will. Will decided to do what he could to help Casey keep his job.
Will saw an email from J.T. that laid out the issue—J.T. told Casey that, after attending a meeting, he didn’t feel confident in Casey’s capabilities. Will was shocked at how harsh this news was and how matter of factly it was delivered via email.
However, once Will got the chance to see a meeting in action, he began to understand the problem and the concern from Playsoft. The meeting, scheduled for 10, began at 10:12. No one had reviewed the minutes from last week’s meeting. All of the same problems that had been clear in the previous meeting that J.T. attended were clear in this one as well. They conducted useless arguments, presentations went on for far too long, and by the time they took a quick break with only 30 minutes to go in the 2-hour meeting, it was clear they wouldn’t get to anything of substance from most of the agenda.
After the meeting, as Will headed to lunch with Tim and Casey, Tim asked Will what he thought of the meeting. Will blurted out that it was terrible. He immediately felt bad, but later in the day, Casey told Will he didn’t mind that Will had told the truth. Casey, though, remained convinced that the problems with the meetings that J.T. had referred to in his email were simply a way for J.T. to get in the door, with the ultimate goal of taking Casey’s job. Casey remained fixated on the profits, which he said remained better than those of most of Playsoft’s product lines. Will began to worry that Casey wasn’t understanding the seriousness of the problems with the meetings.
At the next meeting, all of the same problems persisted. But this time, Will couldn’t take it anymore, and he blurted out his concerns to the entire group: They waste time, they don’t talk about anything important, essential people skip them consistently, and they deplete morale. Casey decided to clear the room, and he spoke to Will directly. He let Will know that he knew about his condition from his father. Casey was kind to Will, and when everyone came back, they agreed that he would apologize to the team.
However, when the team came back, people began piping up, one by one, that they agreed with Will. The meetings were awful and draining. They aired their grievances—the meetings were too long, or too boring, or too unfocused—and Casey got a bit defensive, arguing that no one liked the meetings because meetings are inherently boring. While the team felt good having aired some of their problems, they didn’t imagine that anything could change. Each one of them believed that the meetings as Casey constructed them were a necessary evil.
Will was not so certain that there was no answer to their problems. While watching a movie over the weekend, Will thought he had found the problem—the length. Great movies can cover huge lengths of time, sometimes years, in less than two hours, so why did a meeting, which had much less temporal ground to cover, have to be as long as a movie?
When Will went into work on Monday, a colleague informed him that J.T. would be at the meeting that day and that Casey had been at the dentist that morning. The dentist gave him novocaine in his mouth, so he couldn’t speak well.
Will took the lead in the meeting. It went more quickly than usual, and people in the room were pleased with it, but J.T. still went to Casey’s office afterward and let him know that he had called the head of Playsoft, Wade, and explained that he thought the meetings were terrible. Wade would be attending a meeting in five weeks, and Wade informed Casey that he still had confidence in him. It was clear, though, that if the meetings weren’t better in five weeks, that confidence could be gone quickly.
Casey had never seriously considered working anywhere other than at Yip. He loved it there and he had no idea what he would do if J.T. pushed him out. Will wanted to help as best as he could, and as he watched some movies to attempt to unwind, he realized that the problem with the meetings wasn’t the length but the lack of drama.
Will developed this theory and decided to present it to the team at the next meeting. Screenwriters had figured out that for a movie to be successful, it needs conflict, or a problem that needs to be solved or resolved. Will applied a similar logic to meetings. In fact, the decisions made in meetings are actually much more important to the participants’ lives than a movie.
Just like in the movies, meetings have to have a hook—a good beginning that leaves participants willing to digest necessary plot exposition that might be a little slower. Consider discussing a budget: It sounds boring. But if the leader of the discussion sets it up correctly—by explaining the stakes in the line items and the competitors breathing down the company’s neck—people will be more willing to engage.
After the setup of the conflict, keep looking for differences of opinion. It’s unlikely that, after the team airs their conflict, they will reach a complete consensus. However, everyone will feel better after airing their grievances and making compelling points on the behalf of their idea, and when a decision is made by a majority or by a leader, people will be more willing to support it, even if it wasn’t their original idea.
Casey and the team then practiced creating drama in meetings with a discussion about a picnic that the company was paying for by taking money out of the budgets of other departments. Though it seemed trivial, the picnic was a longstanding issue for the company. Many executives were angry that the company was taking out even a small amount of money from their budgets to fund the picnic, and the woman in charge of the picnic was frustrated because she didn’t even want to lead the event. When everyone involved aired their grievances, they all felt better. But still, Casey wasn’t perfect at facilitating discussion right away—he sometimes shied away from conflict or didn’t know when to move on from a topic—and Will thought that they could do better.
He went back to thinking about the movies. He started developing theories, and with only two weeks to go now before the meeting with Wade, Will was nervous. He decided he needed to present his new theories to the team. According to Will, just like the movies and television, all good meetings have two big elements: drama and structure.
He also believed that even though this team had trouble with the meetings, they needed to have more of them.
Carefully tailor each of these meetings, just like each of the mediums they are based on. Employees should know what they’re signing up for—whether it be a five-minute news broadcast or a whole miniseries. Let’s break down these meetings:
The team in the room accepted the finer points of each meeting and mostly liked the ideas. But while presenting, Will let slip that J.T. and Wade would be attending a meeting to assess Casey’s performance, and that Casey’s job was on the line. The team was up in arms about the possibility of Casey getting fired over meeting performance, but Casey assured the team that they needed to fix the meetings not only for his own job security, but also for the functioning of the company.
Will was feeling nervous, so he called an administrative assistant he knew in Chicago to try and get some more intel on J.T. She told him that she couldn’t say too much, but when Playsoft acquired her subsidiary company, she and her boss both almost quit after J.T. came around to the company frequently.
Will and Casey started to prepare for the fast-approaching meeting. First, they decided that they would do a strategic meeting, as this would best show J.T. the enthusiasm that the team had developed for their new meeting strategy. They wanted to bring up a couple of important issues and discuss them well in earshot of J.T. and Wade. Casey, who had been despondent about his situation, started to get motivated.
Rather than simulate a meeting or rehearse, the team decided to prepare by figuring out their agenda and doing research to come prepared for a great strategy session. Each member of the executive team put forward an idea for discussion at the upcoming meeting, from which they chose two for the agenda: whether they should sponsor a tournament on the PGA tour and whether they should make games other than niche sports ones.
Throughout the week, Casey didn’t do much research of his own, as he wanted to come to the meeting with a fresh perspective, able to interrogate his team’s thoughts without sounding practiced or robotic. As the team moved through the week doing their research, the spirits in the office also lifted. They were working harder, staying through dinner, but they felt as if they had a purpose.
At the end of the week, though, when Casey did a check-in, his teams were concerned—they weren’t agreeing with one another and felt they didn’t have enough data to make one clear suggestion. Casey reminded them all, though, that this was good. Well-articulated debate was what they were hoping for in the meeting.
When the day arrived for the meeting, Wade’s assistant informed Casey that Wade actually wouldn’t be coming. It was only J.T. who would be at the meeting and would have the final say. Casey was nervous.
As everyone filed into the meeting room, J.T. greeted Casey, and they commenced with discussion. The leader of the first team, Sophia, presented the question at issue—whether Yip should start making games other than sports.
As she began her presentation, Casey immediately interrupted, asking for a concrete recommendation. Sophia hemmed and hawed, but Will then interrupted, presenting his thoughts on the issue. A spirited debate, led by Casey, began. Casey stated up front that he was opposed to the idea of expansion into different kinds of games at the moment. Some on the team, though, argued that the numbers showed that they needed to expand, because sports games were becoming less popular relative to the gaming industry as a whole. They debated this decision for about an hour.
Finally, everyone weighed in with their final decision. The room was split. Casey then made his final decision, while admitting that he had gone back and forth throughout the hour—they were actually going to contract their portfolio a bit, focusing explicitly on golf and less on other sports games. They agreed, as an executive team, that they could cut into the market share of their competitors if everyone worked harder and better. They would also have to lay off some people at the margins.
At this point, they were attempting to move on to the second topic, when J.T. finally interrupted to ask them what their numbers have been looking like. Casey was a little phased, but he responded that they don’t talk numbers at their monthly strategic meeting. J.T. pushed him, but Casey remained steadfast—he was willing to show J.T. the numbers, but only after the two-hour meeting was up. Will was impressed.
So they moved on to the question of PGA sponsorship—the team leader Connor began by explaining that, in the grand scheme of things, the sponsorship was less expensive than they believed it would be. There was some disagreement from Sophia, though, that the sponsorship would take away from their advertising in other areas, which was already weak. She explained, after J.T. asked about what their advertising impact was, that this was difficult to measure, because people generally bought from pro golf shops, not Yip directly.
They were in the midst of a robust discussion, and wondering if their decision made earlier in the meeting to focus more directly on golf games would impact their decision on sponsorship, when J.T.’s cell rang. He took the call, spoke for a few seconds, and then informed the team that he was leaving.
People in the meeting were confused, but J.T.’s departure had deflated some of the tension. The group cracked jokes about J.T. and took a quick break. When they came back, however, they were concerned. They had been preparing for this big meeting to impress J.T. and save their boss’s job, and J.T. had just left. Some in the room wanted to discuss why he had left or what had happened, but Casey insisted that they continue their sponsorship discussion. They finished up their discussion and agreed that sponsorship looked like a good choice in theory, but that they’d have to find the right tournament.
Casey addressed the team, telling them they’d had a great meeting. He also told them to try not to worry about J.T., because they had done all that they could. The team went out for lunch together.
Casey was mostly heeding his own advice when he got a call from a friend at a different division. The friend told him that he had heard rumors that the next day, there was going to be a big announcement that somehow involved J.T. He started to worry, wondering what it could mean, and he stayed up thinking about the meeting, J.T., and the last few weeks.
When Casey arrived at his office and found an email from Wade. Wade wrote that he was retiring and J.T. would be replacing him as CEO. It also explained that, for the past few years, J.T. had been deeply involved in the acquisition of new companies and was chiefly responsible for turning around what he saw as deficiencies in the companies that Playsoft acquired. In doing so he upset many of the leaders of these companies, but he also watched their sales spike. Wade went on to say that he felt pleased to announce this publicly and explain some of the reasoning behind why J.T. had been so tough on new acquisitions.
Casey felt all kinds of emotions at this announcement. It was almost unbelievable, but also a total relief, because he realized that rather than hanging onto his job by the skin of his teeth, he was participating in a strategy that had made Yip better. He talked to his wife and thanked Will, while laughing with him about what they had gone through. At the end of the day, Casey decided to start packing up early and thought about going to play some golf.
In his office, though, was J.T. He sat down and tried to explain why he was so difficult and demanding. Casey, feeling a bit emboldened, asked if J.T. actually thought the meetings were such a big problem. J.T. said yes, because bad meetings could lead to bad decisions and end with a large amount of unfulfilled potential.
Casey asked if J.T. had ever intended to replace him, and J.T. said probably not. He expanded on his role to Casey, explaining that he had been equally demanding with other executives at Playsoft subsidiaries who didn’t have issues with meetings but had issues relating to performance or expenses. Given that Casey now understood J.T.’s motivation to make Yip (and all Playsoft acquisitions) better, he started to feel a bit better about his boss.
And then, J.T. explained that Casey shouldn’t tell anyone about his performance management techniques for two reasons. If Playsoft acquired another company, and they found out about J.T.’s techniques, then they wouldn’t work. And if the executive team found out that this was all partially a ruse to help improve performance and create urgency, they’d feel less motivated to keep going on their current track, which was working well.
J.T. concluded by explaining that while it was a partial ruse, it wasn’t a full ruse, because he did expect Casey’s meetings to improve a lot. If they didn’t improve at all, he would have had to think about what to do next. While he may not have fired Casey right away, he may have had to engage Casey in an intense training program to improve. All of this made sense to Casey, and he left their sitdown feeling confident about J.T. as the new CEO.
When the team found out that J.T. was taking over as CEO, they worried, but Casey assured them that he was keeping his job, so they started to feel better. Plus, their new meeting strategy was working, and they were starting to perform better in all aspects of their business. Yip had a new energy that they were able to sustain.
Will worked with the team to implement their meeting strategy and iron out any potential issues, which included feeling the need to schedule more strategic meetings than was necessary because of disagreements that had come up at previous strategic meetings. He made sure they understood what could be solved by just some of them and what needed a full group meeting.
Within a few months, they were up to speed, after making small tweaks on Will’s system to make it run efficiently for Yip’s needs and specific challenges. Once the team was all set, Will didn’t see too much of a role for himself at the company, so he found Casey a decent replacement and set about following his dream of making it in the film industry.
A few years later, Will happened to run into Casey at a golf course in San Francisco. They decided to play together, and Casey caught Will up on everything going on with Yip. J.T., after a year, decided to step down as Playsoft’s CEO and form his own consulting business to help struggling companies get on track. Yip, though, was still conducting the meetings as Will had organized them. And when new people joined the team, they were confused and scared at first by the conflict, but they got to enjoy it.