It’s weird that an absolutely guaranteed, never fail way of making people happy at work is to end a meeting early, yet so few leaders take advantage of this simple, instantaneously joy-producing means of bringing happiness to the workplace.
Also, what are the odds that you schedule a meeting for 60 minutes and just happen to have exactly 60 minutes of content to present or discuss every single time?
It’s also bizarre that in almost any other context, completing a job in the most efficient way possible is also considered the best way possible, but in the case of meetings, efficiency is almost always ignored in favor of adhering to the schedule.
Schedule an hour. Fill an hour.
The Matthew Dicks Law of Meetings:
Meetings always expand to fill the allotted time.
It’s even worse in education, where administrators routinely treat teachers and staff like students because many are former teachers who never worked outside of education and received almost no formal management training prior to or even after their promotion.
As a McDonald’s manager, I was routinely sent to business school, management training seminars, and the company’s own management training program. Hundreds of hours were invested in order to transform me into a knowledgeable, effective manager of people and systems.
This does not happen in any school district that I know, and it’s often ignored in the business world, too. I consult with one vice-president who climbed the ladder from computer programmer to leader of a team of dozens without ever receiving a single ounce of management training. Much of our time is spent passing on the lessons I learned as a McDonald’s manager to him.
It’s crazy.
In education, this creates an environment where instead of managing teachers and staff like professionals, administrators often treat them like students, running meetings like they ran their classrooms, complete with assigned seating, learning targets, and the same structure and activities you might find in an elementary classroom. And since teachers can almost never end class early, even if the content has been covered and objectives have been met, administrators simply do the same.
For example:
You clearly finish your training at 4:00, but since the contracted work day ends at 4:30, and because administrators can’t trust a teacher to fill their time productively and ethically, they stretch.
Add nonsense activities to fill time.
Unintentionally provoke hatred and disgust from the teachers who can always see through their ineffective, time-sucking veneer.
Not all administrators are so monstrous and ineffective, of course. I’m currently working for one of the good ones. Not all managers are so awful, either. But I’ve known quite a few in my time, and I have many friends and clients currently working for these time-wasting, soul-sucking, untrained leaders today.
My simple, unassailable, never fail advice to anyone who is scheduling a meeting, running a meeting, or managing people in any way:
End every meeting early for the rest of your damn life. The five or ten or fifteen minutes given back to your people will ultimately mean nothing to you in a day or a week, but the goodwill and appreciation generated will resonate for a long, long time.
