Tuesday’s post was about managing the library agenda in a macro, high-level way, by being careful to avoid the mistake of allowing your organizational agenda to be driven by the person who happens to be making his case in your office at any given moment. 

Today we’re going to talk about avoiding a similar, but more micro and granular error: unintentionally letting the first item on your meeting agenda become the one on which the most meeting time is spent.

Now, it’s important to note that there are many different ways of managing meeting agendas, and none is perfect; all of them have pros and cons. One way is to arrange the agenda in descending order of importance, and to take as much time as needed with each topic; this ensures that the most important item will get all the discussion time required, and that the likelihood of an item being pushed to the next meeting is inversely proportional to its importance. Another strategy is to assign a specific amount of meeting time to each agenda item, using both the importance and the complexity of the issue to determine how much time will be budgeted to each item.

And another way – let’s face it, the most common one – to organize a meeting agenda is simply to keep a running list of items up until the meeting, adding items to the list as they arise, and them providing the undifferentiated list to meeting attendees with no time allocations and no indication as to which items are either most urgent or most important.  

Although I’ve acknowledged that there is no single, perfect way to administer a meeting agenda, I’m going to make two very specific recommendations here. But first, some underlying realities of meeting management:

First, we all know how difficult it is to call an end to discussion of complex or difficult issues. (Let’s call this the “Inertia Problem”: discussions in motion tend to remain in motion.) In many cases, you will never arrive at a point where there’s no longer anything useful to be said on the topic; you will only arrive at a point where you have to choose to stop talking and make a decision. If you’re leading the meeting, your difficult task is to determine where that point is and then insist that the discussion end and the decision-making happen. 

Second, the current agenda item is the in-meeting equivalent of the employee who is standing in your office, passionately advocating for a proposal. That person is not more important than the other employees who are not currently in your office (and who may or may not share his advocacy for the proposal), but he’s the one you are being forced to deal with right now, and the temptation to mollify or placate him may work against taking the needs of all other employees (or library patrons) into account. (Let’s call this the “Proximity-Importance Fallacy.”)

Third, we all just lose track of time, especially when an issue is interesting, complex, or controversial. (Let’s call this “Time Blindness.”) I can’t count the number of times I’ve been in a two-hour meeting with a five-item agenda, and have suddenly looked at the clock in the middle of a fascinating and engaging discussion and realized that we’ve spent half of our allocated meeting time on the first agenda item – and are not yet anywhere near a resolution to that item.

The solution to these three problems – Inertia, the Proximity-Importance Fallacy, and Time Blindness – is (and please now picture me adopting a B-movie Nazi accent and walking stiff-legged around the room with a swagger stick under my arm) discipline! 

OK, “discipline” is easy to say. But in the context of managing meeting agendas, what does “discipline” actually look like?

I’m going to suggest two discipline strategies that will make your meetings both more productive and more enjoyable.

First, don’t have a meeting about a topic that doesn’t need a meeting. With my leadership team, most of the items on our meeting agendas are only there because we first determined that they couldn’t be handled asynchronously by email. This doesn’t mean we don’t deal with a lot of stuff in meetings – we meet weekly and our agendas are usually quite full – but it does mean that we don’t waste precious face-to-face time talking about items that don’t really require face-to-face discussion. Sometimes we start out discussing an issue by email, and quickly realize that we really do need in-person discussion, perhaps involving people from outside the leadership team as well. Fair enough; in that case, we still save meeting time by having gotten a head start on the topic.

Second, give each agenda item a time budget and either stick with it or consciously reallocate time during the meeting. For example: suppose you need to discuss a personnel issue that is important but not complicated, and you believe that 20 minutes of a two-hour meeting will be sufficient. You then allocate other chunks of time to four or five other agenda items, all of those allocations adding up to two hours. For that personnel issue, one of three things is going to happen: either you’ll take care of it in less than 20 minutes (excellent!), or you’ll be wrapping up the discussion at around the 19^th minute (still great!), or you’ll come to minute 18 and realize that the issue is going to require more than 20 minutes of discussion (oops). In that third scenario, drawing the discussion to a premature conclusion just because you’re out of time would be a mistake. Instead, you should pause for a moment, acknowledge that the item needs more discussion time, and propose one of two approaches: either suspend discussion and defer its continuation to a later meeting, or reallocate time from another current agenda item so that discussion can continue. (This could mean spending less time on another planned topic, or maybe pushing another agenda item to a later meeting entirely.) Either of those approaches allows you to keep control of the meeting’s time management – and it has at least two very important effects: first, it maximizes the likelihood that you’ll spend the right amount of time on the right topics; second, it increases your team’s confidence that your library is handling issues in a conscious, strategic, and rational way.

Now, I realize that the paragraph above might seem a bit rigid and prescriptive. A bit… I don’t know… Nazi. But here’s the thing: if you fail to allocate meeting time consciously and strategically, you will end up allocating it passively and chaotically, and that’s never a recipe for effective leadership or for a happy and effective library organization.

Takeaways and Action Items

• Remember that meeting agendas do not manage themselves. The only way they get managed effectively is if someone takes explicit responsibility for managing them.
• Assess your own meeting-management strategies. Are they effective? Do you regularly find yourself frustrated by your inability to get everything done in a meeting that you need to? Would any of the strategies discussed above be helpful?
• How do you asses both the importance of agenda items and the amount of time that each will likely need? Is that assessment method working well for you?