I don’t know the origin of the term “all hands meeting.” Sometimes people refer to it by the acronym AHM.  Just a little advice — AHM can also refer to:

• Automated Hacking Machines
• Adaptive Handoff Management
• Airline History Museum
• Airport Handling Manual
• Anterior Hyaloid Membrane

…and over a dozen other terms, so personally I would avoid it.  Could be confusing.  As acronyms usually are.

Anyway, I would venture the All Hand Meeting term originated with the maritime phrase “all hands on deck.”  Picture the ship captain (that’s YOU!  Or the EXECUTIVE TEAM!), charting a course (the BUSINESS STRATEGY), and then calling the crew (EMPLOYEES) up top for a hearty kick in the wooly britches.  The captain urges the swashbucklers to toughen up for the voyage (NEXT QUARTER), brace for the next storm (STRUGGLING GLOBAL ECONOMY, NEW COMPETITIVE CHALLENGES), and fortify themselves for a long stretch without provisions (BUDGET CUTS), not to mention and stingy meals of stale bread and water (LOUSY RAISES AND BONUSES).   Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum! 

Ah! The All Hands Meeting.  What will you say when you get up to speak about the state of the organization?  How will you stand and deliver a talk that perfectly frames the current issues, challenging people to move forward and redouble their efforts?  

The purpose of the all hands meeting is quite simple.  Think of it as the President’s State of the Union Address.  You may not get 40 standing ovations on live TV, but your talk should stir genuine emotion from your employees.  Strive to speak eloquently, succinctly and clearly about the current and future state of the enterprise.  Paint a vision of where you have been and where you are going.  Get out the compass, set a course, and tell us how we get to that distant shore.

So, your AHM is coming up soon.  Where should you begin?

May I suggest that the first step is NOT to pull out the musty, old slide deck from the LAST quarter’s all hands meeting.  Think about starting from scratch, and preparing a fresh, new, “killer” presentation.  

What you say matters.  Every word.  Take time to make it great.  Getting people together isn’t logistically easy, and it’s expensive.  And your own professional reputation is riding on this.  You’re evaluated as a leader every time you get up to speak.  Make it count. 

One thing about this fall that’s worth noting - people are still feeling “at sea” because of economic uncertainty.  You would think they would be more motivated to work hard.  But people are actually  paralyzed by fear.  Clear the log jam and get that ship sailing.  

I do everything in my power to shut out the drumbeat of negative economic news, as I know you do.  But  most people don’t.  So it takes a toll.  They need leaders who will stand up and lead. People are only human; they’ve been resourceful for a long time, projects are demanding, and they are tired.  They need to be inspired.

My advice? To inspire, you have to BE inspired.   Ask yourself these questions and then answer them for your team: 

1.        Where are we going? And why is it the right course?  How do you know?

2.       What makes you believe it can be done?  

3.       How do you know that our team can do this?  

4.       Where can we course-correct?   

5.       How do you know we can do it? 

6.       What’s cool about our company? (Tell them how brilliant they are)  

7.       How will we know when we’ve arrived?   

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I used to be a devotee of the CBS show “Survivor.”  It’s fascinating the way that human beings adapt and live through horrible, if contrived circumstances.  In the corporate world, the equivalent of Survivor is the dreaded business meeting.  You don’t have to be wearing a loin cloth and eating worms to feel like a contestant.  Running from meeting to meeting, you must learn to outwit, outlast and outplay.

Like travelers in a jungle without food, water or time to think, people are desperate.  It’s not just physical deprivation.  It is the emotional toll.  When meetings routinely start late, run long, are badly managed, and accomplish little, you go a little insane.  To survive, you must outwit.  Come late; schedule calls during the meetings on purpose; duck out to answer “emergency” email; or just don’t show up.  Manipulate people to make them think you’re with them; leave the meeting and shoot them down behind their backs.  It’s a brutal, brutal game.    

Yesterday I was coaching a leadership team, and decided to throw down the gauntlet.  The topic was leading great meetings.  Something had to be done to shake things up.  I said, “Name one routine meeting that you could cut out altogether, or cut in half.  Add up the hours you would save.”   In the room: 11 leaders.  These are their numbers: 45, 45, 200, 10, 45, 25, 25, 45, 45, 90, 25.   That 600 hours a year.  For 11 people. 

Take it macro. The company has roughly 27,000 employees.  Imagine 20,000 of them routinely attend these types of meetings.  I could be flip and say “you do the math,” but what the heck - let me get out my calculator.  Hold on … it’s 12,000,000.   That is not a typo.  12 million “man hours.”  By cutting out one meeting. 

12 million is the record number of the famous posters Farrah Fawcet sold.  12 million is a lot of hours.  Hours that could be spent productively doing the work that drives your company forward.

Is it really possible to save this much time?  Of course!  There are three aspects to meeting “management:”  

• Planning - how you prepare for the meeting
• Conducting - what happens when you get into the room
• Leading  - the vital role that a meeting “owner” plays

The secret to success is commitment.  Learn the skills, commit to a new path, develop guidelines.  Come back in a month.  Take stock.  No excuses. 

Pretty soon, meetings start..going well.  You know how on Survivor when they get to take the luxury sailboat cruise around the island and get a hot shower, a burger and a beer?   People feel human again.  They want to get off the island.    

Here are a few “get off the island” tips:

• Decide whether or not to have the meeting - how else can you handle it?
• Eliminate people who don’t need to attend - the more people, the more time things take.
• Communicate the purpose of the meeting - if you don’t konw why you’re here, it expands.  
• Send a written agenda in advance so people come prepared and stick to the topics.
• Get rid of the “optional” and “tentative” invitations- commit or don’t have the meeting.
• Get decision makers and stakeholders to the table - otherwise you’ll be having another meeting.  
• Always go by the agenda; time for each item, owners, next step, outcomes.
• Set aside ten minutes at the end of every single meeting to assign tasks and deadlines.
• Plan shorter meetings. 10 minutes instead of 20. 20 instead of 30.  50 instead of an hour.

Don’t tell me “It’s not our culture,” or We’re a very inclusive group, we like to discuss things.”  Culture schmulture.  Anyone can do this.  

Or not.  That’s okay.  Back to the island for you.  Pass the worms.  

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I really don’t want to write this article.  You know, the one on the use of Blackberries in meetings.  Shellie, our business manager, is making me do it. 

I don’t want to write this because I don’t have all the answers.  But Shellie is right.  If the business world doesn’t get a handle on this insidious, pervasive, focus-sucking problem; we’re all going to go just a tiny bit crazy.  

So…here goes.

If your company, your group or your boss HAS RULES on the use of Blackberries in meetings, I’m willing to bet one thing - there are always people who violate the rules, and most of them get away with it most of the time.  If you DON’T HAVE RULES it’s a sure bet that your meetings are taking twice as long - and you’re getting half as much done.  

There are multitudes of reasons (excuses) why people flaunt any rules the organization tries to set forth. 

• They’re overwhelmed with work. 
• Meetings are too long. 
• Meetings are poorly run.
• They don’t know how to delegate.
• They have extremely short attention spans.
• The meetings aren’t relevant to them.
• They are addicted to the darned thing. 
• They are poor time managers.
• The organization is E-mail happy.
• Things that should be happening by phone are happening in Cyberspace.

Are you at a loss as how to tame the Blackberry beast?  Join the club. Even in our office, when it has been clearly stated at the beginning of the meeting that people should turn off their Blackberries and put them away, I see them “sneaking out.”  (Emergency with the kids, expecting an important email from a client, etc).  So, there they sit, on the side of the conference table, or worse, in laps, where they are hardly concealed and just as distracting.  

The problem is- it is hard to argue with the reasons.  Like I said.  I don’t have all the answers.

The other day I gave a four-hour workshop on Communicating Like a Leader to a leadership team offsite meeting.  I must say, I was pretty impressed with this group - only about 10% had Blackberries out on the table.  But still, I find when even a few are using them, others are sitting there thinking - “Maybe I should be monitoring my E-mail, too.  Perhaps I’m not as on-top-of-it as this guy.”  Or, “if she has it out, why shouldn’t I? I guess the boss really doesn’t care.” 

If the BOSS has the Blackberry on vibrate on the table - going off every 18 seconds - all bets are off.  It is over.  That IS the standard.  A few weeks ago a Fortune 500 company paid our firm tens of thousands of dollars to deliver several days of training.  Most of the participants had their Blackberries out on the desks the entire time.  So, what should be done?  Is this a good use of their precious time and money? Should I care?    

This morning I went searching for some “new rules” on Blackberries and found a lot of the same old stuff.  Oh, there were some nuggets - but I’m telling you that I don’t think anybody has this thing figured out.  This isn’t like getting people to comply with seat belt laws.  When people don’t buckle up - there’s a consequence - they die.  When people don’t put the Blackberries in the “holster” it’s only a meeting that is dead on arrival.

So having said all that - let me offer up 10 “new rules” on Blackberry etiquette and good meeting practice, and you tell me what you think.

1. Make a rule - Blackberries off during the meeting.
2. Allow exceptions and get agreement (real emergencies, crisis in the office, and define that)
3. Tell people they must leave the meeting not just to talk, but to type, so they don’t distract others.
4. Devices must be on vibrate, and never on the table.
5. Promise and hold firm on predictable breaks.  At least one in a two hour meeting. 
6. Use timed agendas and send them in advance, so people know when they can slip out.
7. If you’re the meeting leader - follow the rules- you cannot be the exception.
8. Get group agreement on the new norms, so that you aren’t the only one “calling people out” 
9. Make your meetings shorter and have fewer meetings.
10. Tell folks when meeting with clients/prospects/influencers, there are no exceptions.  No Blackberries.  At all.  Not in the lap, not on the table, not anywhere. 

Okay, the electronic mailbag is open for your comments.  Let me know what you think.  Maybe collectively we can come up with even better answers. 

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We were crammed like sardines into a conference room smaller than my kid sister’s bedroom growing up, and believe me that’s Lilliputian - it was a sewing room before she came along and sort of surprised my parents.  Anyway, the Bates team was crowded into our smallest meeting room debating whether the image of a Native American should be included on a PowerPoint slide with a proverb that we had recently learned could not be credibly traced to a single source.  Indian? Buddhist? Native American? Photo or no photo? Attribute to anonymous?  Red or blue background for the quote? This conversation among well paid consultants drifted on for several minutes until somebody woke up, blew the whistle and said, “Can we move on?”

It wouldn’t have mattered had we also not just spent precious minutes deciding which bullet points to eliminate on a slide about why storytelling is important.  Generally the rule is six bullet point lines per page so your audience doesn’t have to squint.  There were maybe 7 or 8 bullet points so the raging issue was which ones should stay and which ones should go and couldn’t we shorten the messages because it was too much information which it was but they were all important so what should we do………………..5 minutes later ………………………… you know the drill.

This was not a meeting to prepare a PowerPoint presentation.  It was a planning session about creating an exceptional event for a new client. It’s not that the little things don’t matter - of course they do - it’s just that six or eight people editing a slide is not a good use of time and resources.  

That’s what got me thinking about how it’s just so darn easy for even productive professional people to lose their way and get swept up in the minutiae.   

Why does it happen so often?  How do we end up in the weeds?  One minute there’s an important topic on the table; the next minute everybody has lapsed into a coma. It’s as if the Bad Meeting Fair came along and sprinkled ”sleep dust” into everybody’s eyes.  A trance-like state overcomes the room; those immune to pixie dust are restating the obvious and dawdling over issues that matter not; everybody else has saucer eyes.  Someone walking into the room at that moment would easily spot The Meeting Stare.  You know - people around the table day-dreaming about buying a summer home or ruminating about whether to ditch the Lean Cuisine and go out for a turkey wrap and tortilla soup.

As communications consultants, our firm teaches seminars on meeting best practices and effectiveness.  If I do say so myself, it’s one of our better courses.  So I certainly don’t mean to imply by sharing that story that we don’t practice what we preach.  I’m proud of our team because we’re pretty good at planning meetings, creating accurate, timed agendas, stating and ending on time, and fostering productive conversation that leads to action steps and accountability.  We have a great rapport which makes it easy to use humor and good natured jabs to get back on topic.  Yes, we are human and we get off course but what makes it work is we are also allowed to pull out the red flag out and throw it if the group goes off course.

It isn’t a failure if your meeting occasionally goes into the weeds; it’s whether and how you pull out that determines your success.  If everybody comes in the door with a clear sense of purpose, determined to get it done and get out, then you are more likely to avoid prolonged debates about nothing that take you back to your desk for a Tylenol after the meeting.  What I’m saying is that everybody in the room needs to be empowered to pull the flag and call people on “weedy” conversation when the meeting goes down a rat hole.

What is at stake isn’t just productivity and efficiency, though that would be enough.  If your meetings aren’t well run, then good people will conclude that they don’t belong there.  The people you want in your organization won’t stay because they won’t thrive in a culture where time is wasted.   They don’t want to hang out with colleagues who don’t seem to care if little is accomplished.  Meetings are important and necessary but you can’t allow them to become the Godzilla that ate your company.

One way to encourage this culture is to manage time on each topic in a mindful way.  Every meeting doesn’t need to be an hour.  They can be 25 minutes.  Or 7.  People make fun of me when they see my agendas with odd numbers, but I really try to think - is this worth five minutes or three?  Could we do this in 7 instead of 10?   Add it up - you can shave off a lot of time and avoid a lot of minutiae this way.

Prepare an agenda, time it, keep people on course and let everybody know they’re also responsible for keeping things moving.  And, if the Bad Meeting Fairy shows up, get out your old tennis racket and shoe her out of the room. 

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