How to Avoid Meeting Burnout

Many incredible books have been written about how to redeem the meeting. It was Patrick Lencioni that said that in business, meetings are what we do. If we call meetings a “necessary evil” it’s like a surgeon saying, “surgeries are a necessary evil…” Imagine if you were going into surgery with that mindset every day. “I just need to get through this and then I can do the real work.” We’d be looking for a new surgeon.

The real work of partnerships is done in the meeting.

Many people smarter than I can help you structure your meetings well, and actually, Gino Wickman in Traction wrote about how to structure different meetings from annual, quarterly and even weekly. We adapted his framework in a recent blog, “Getting Traction in Partnerships Part 6: The Traction Component.” It’s a quick read. So take a look. Patrick Lencioni, in his book Death by Meeting, even encourages a daily meeting called the daily stand up. Aptly titled because he encourages everyone to stand up during the meeting.

So I’m not going to reinvent the wheel, as they say, but I think there’s something here for us in the partnership space.

When I first joined the partnership profession, I thought my value was in the number of meetings I had filling my calendar. I thought it was a badge of honor, until I realized it wasn’t. It was easy to schedule meetings for the sake of meetings, and I was quickly burnt out. And now, as a partnership consultant, building partner programs for multiple companies, and building CoPort, meetings are still filling my calendar.

But I’m not burnt out anymore.

It’s not the number of meetings that’s the problem. It’s what we do in the meetings that is.

Too many of us waste our most valuable asset during our meetings. And if you are wondering what our most valuable asset is, at least in my perspective, it’s time. Time is the most valuable asset we possess, and dare I say it, we waste so much of it in the meetings we run.

So what’s the solution? Is it to have less meetings? For many of us that’s just not possible. Remember, the real work of partnerships is done in the meeting.

If we can’t do away with a meeting, and we can’t keep going on like this—dragging ourselves from meeting to meeting, then our only response is to be better with meetings.

If our companies are going to grow through partnerships, I believe the secret is in the meeting.

Let me tell you a story of a partnership I’m working on. For one of my clients, who’s partner program has been around for years, but I would say is still maturing, we’ve built a good cadence with one of our emerging partners. We meet every two weeks, talk for the 30 minutes and then two weeks later, do the same thing again. Every week almost repeats the exact same agenda: Introductions and then us trying to figure out what to do together. There’s lots of planning, but no execution—lots of dreaming with no traction. I remember sitting through one of these meetings and we ended with going around in circles with two plans that would not help us move our partnership forward. The ideas were great, but we needed early customers for our integration, not more third party partnerships. We needed traction, movement, action, not more planning.

The next meeting I was determined to do something different. I didn’t want to have another conversation where we didn’t have any movement forward. I pulled up a partner plan I’ve been running with another partner in our ecosystem and I said, “Hey, I’ve tried things like this with another partner, what if we do it, too?” We knew where our partnership was at, we took a look at the scorecard, and then we went into the action that would help move both of our businesses forward.

Having a plan and getting to action redeemed that meeting for both of our companies. It was getting to the point where we were both thinking, maybe we should start pushing out our meeting to monthly or quarterly… People spend their time on things that are valuable. And that meeting was not valuable.

By showing the wins early in the meeting and then moving to actionable items, we redeemed our biweekly and now it’s something I look forward to. I look forward to it because we’re doing the work in the meeting of moving our business forward.

You can redeem your meetings with your partners, too. Start the meeting with catching up with the person, and then move on into the work. Uncover the rocks, address the issues, and leave with actionable next steps.

Don’t waste your time with your meetings. Use them to your advantage, use them to make your partnership more effective.

Because we know our companies win when our partnerships get better.

Photo by The Jopwell Collection on Unsplash