Too Many Meetings? Here’s Meeting Delegation in Five Steps
Are you in a managerial or leadership position? Are you attending too many meetings? Here’s a way to solve your problem and grow your people at the same time.
We all hear our colleagues and people around us complain about having too many meetings to attend, especially if they are in a leadership role. You may very well be in the same situation.
Thankfully we can improve all that with deliberate work and some tweaking of habits/instincts.
The following principle also applies to other type of time sink. If you should be spending your time on more valuable work, then your goal should be to create more time for yourself. And you probably have a meeting or two that are good candidates for the culling.
I touched on this point in my latest video, so for more details you can watch the video, but here’s, what I hope, a good summary:
Time is your most important resource; the one thing that you cannot have more than others (I’m hoping that one day we’ll be able to manipulate time in significant ways 🤓. Until then you’re stuck with 24h/day.)
Your main goal should be to break the cycle of reactive work and make time to think, which enables proactive work.
Learning How To Say “No”?
You probably heard this general advice before: to make more time for yourself you have to learn how to say “no”. Without a doubt, this is a great skill to have, and one that needs to be practiced. But it cannot get you out of most of your meetings. And if you’re in a leadership position, it is very likely that you are the host/owner of a good part of your meetings.
Enters “Delegation”
An approach that would give you back some time and at the same time grow your people is delegation.
Leaders create other leaders.
We need to hire the right people, give them autonomy and tools, and then trust them to do their job. But we also have to actively challenge and stretch them. They cannot always create all the opportunities for themselves.
You don’t have to be in all the meetings. Not even in all your meetings. You should trust your people to represent you or your team or department. If you’ve established a psychologically safe environment, they shouldn’t be afraid of making mistakes.
Meeting Delegation in Five Steps
1. First, let’s find the right meeting to delegate.
Every organization and department is different so there’s no magic formula here, but you can start with certain types of meetings: the ones that you attend for gathering information or representing your team or department for certain type of expertise.
In short, information dissemination meetings or technical expertise meetings could be good candidates. Better if they’re recurring.
I hope you’re working for an organization where people are comfortable saying “I don’t know, but I’ll find it out”, because that may happen to the person that you choose (well, that may very well happen to you, too).
2. Find the right person.
Do you have someone who could take your place in the future? If you are an engineering manager, do you have a tech lead? Or someone in your team who might be interested in management later? They can be good candidates.
Find that person and go and talk to them. That’s when you need to explain why challenging and stretching them is important for their career. This might very well be a stepping-out-of-the-comfort-zone moment for them.
3. Clearly set the context, and the expectations.
It is important that you give your appointee the right context for the meeting. Tell them what is expected of them during the meeting and what you expect them to do after the meeting: e.g. Are they going to send you the meeting notes or are you going to discuss it during your next 1-on-1?
4. Update the meeting owner and the other participants.
Tell the meeting owner (or organizer) and the other participants that someone else will be attending the meeting in your place. Update them with the information they need to know.
5. Use your free time wisely.
It took me a while to appreciate the value of think time and get comfortable with it (I’ll create a video and write on that specific topic in the future), but now that you’ve created time for yourself use it wisely, hopefully for proactive work.
Voilà!
Let me know what you think and how you get on. I know that real life and real orgs are messier than a video that you watch on your favorite YouTube channel or an article that you read online. But I’m genuinely interested in your opinion and experience.
Thank you for reading and watching.
Please clap generously (press down the button and hum your favorite song) and follow me. I promise to turn your 👏s into more leadership and management stories and videos.
