An Admiral Way of Running a Meeting

In the United States alone, 11 million meetings will be held on any weekday.  Professionals attend an average of 61.8 meetings per month.  Research indicates that over 50 percent of meeting time is wasted.  Many managers fail to consider the negative impact meetings have on the organization’s bottom line. 

Let’s say, for example, you lead a weekly 60-minute staff meeting at which absolutely nothing gets accomplished.  Let’s also assume you lead 20 employees who attend who get paid, on average (after you figure in  wages, benefits, office space, IT resources, administrative assistant help, etc.) $50 an hour. 

What does that one lost hour of week of your staff’s time cost your organization?

If you do the math, you might be surprised to find that your business is losing over $50,000 a year on one lost hour of productivity per week!

What is the biggest knock against these unproductive meetings?  It is that they have no agenda.

A Radical Way of Running A Meeting

So what can you do about it?

Consider the method of Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the United States nuclear navy.  Please pardon the pun, but when it came to running a meeting, Rickover ran a tight ship.

First of all, the admiral would find out ahead of time what his people wanted to talk about.  Then he would complete the first two columns of the following spreadsheet:

Agenda / Minutes

I worked for an organization for which the first word in its name was “Sterling.”  We had a joke that everybody in the organization ran on “Sterling time.”  This meant that if a meeting were scheduled for 9 AM, people would start filing it at, oh, about quarter after or 20 minutes after.  (And you can now see how expensive that was to the organization!)

Not so with a Rickover meeting.

First, the admiral assigned a timekeeper to keep the meeting on track.

The timekeeper would begin the meeting promptly at the assigned time.  Then the attendees would begin to discuss Item A from the spreadsheet.  (The actual spreadsheet would have the name of the topic, rather than the letter “A” that I have placed on the sample spreadsheet above.)

At precisely 9:10, those in attendance would take a vote.  As you can see, Item A passed.  “LM” was assigned responsibility for that item with a deliverable deadline date of June 1^st.

One of the biggest challenges with meetings that we had at the “Sterling” company is that everybody might agree that an item should be accomplished, but rarely would someone held accountable with a specific deadline date. 

Then the group would begin to discuss Item B.

At precisely 9:25, Rickover’s team members would take a vote.  In this case, Item B was turned down.  Therefore, no one was assigned responsibility for the item and there would be no deliverable deadline date.

An interesting thing happened while discussing Item C.  The group decided that they had not allowed sufficient time to adequately discuss Item C.

Rather than the meeting going on, and on, and on, the group decided to withhold making a decision on Item C, being sure to allot enough time to adequately discuss the topic at the next meeting.

At precisely 9:40, the group began to discuss Item D.  At 9:50, they took a vote.  Item D passed, “TB” was assigned responsibility with a deliverable deadline date of July 15^th.

(I had an attendee in one of my seminars who actually attended Admiral Rickover’s meetings.  He told me, “You made sure that you showed up for these meetings, and on time, else you would be assigned responsibility for those tasks nobody else wanted!”)

At precisely 9:50, the group began to discuss Item E, their fifth topic of the meeting.  At the top of the hour, they took a vote.  In a vote, item E failed, therefore no one was assigned responsibility with no deliverable deadline date.

Rickover would then cross out the word “Agenda” at the top of the spreadsheet, making the spreadsheet the meeting’s “Minutes.”

He would scrawl a large “R” over the top of the sheet, thereby giving the meeting minutes his approval.

Rickover would then hand the sheet to his assistant, who would write the date, time and location of the next meeting.  The assistant would make copies and distribute a copy to each attendee so that they would have record of what was discussed and what they would be individually responsible for.

Why did his followers love to come to an Admiral Rickover meeting?

•  Everybody was getting the same information at the same – no having to hear the news through the grapevine.
• They knew that they would be in and out of the meeting on time – allowing them to properly schedule time for the rest of their day.  They would not fret that they would be a half hour or an hour late for their next meeting.
• Everybody’s time was respected.
• If you were invited to the meeting as the subject matter expert for Item D, you could count on arriving at the meeting at 9:40 and being out of the meeting by 9:50.
• With the pressure of a timed agenda, the attendees stayed more focused, and the reward was that they more got done in less time.
• They also spent less money on doughnuts for the meetings, so everyone was trimmer and healthier!