Meetings can be boring time-wasters or outright productivity-killing monsters for your business.  Chances are you’ve got better things to do, and the impact on your productivity is huge, especially if you’re a developer.  A one-hour meeting can pull you out of “the zone” and cost you several hours in getting back to the level of productivity you were at before the meeting.

I think meetings should be like air travel.

Let’s face it, meetings and commercial air travel are both, to some degree, unpleasant experiences, but the travel paradigm can lend a lot to the methodology of how your meetings are conducted.

Specifically, here’s what I like about this idea:

Flights and Meetings should both have a clear destination:

Meetings should have some sort of agenda to help you arrive at an expected or desired outcome.  That’s your destination.  A meeting that gets you nowhere and accomplishes nothing is like sitting in the airport, waiting for bad weather to clear or airplane mechanical issues to be fixed.

You should pass a screening to get in:

You are the TSA screener for your meeting.  Are all of your scheduled attendees necessary and appropriate for this meeting?  Will a summary of the meeting in an email serve them just as well as attending?  Don’t shotgun-address your meeting invites—be judicious.  Especially when it comes to your developers and similar employees for whom a small interruption can cause a big productivity loss for the day.  And you may want to factor in the tangible cost of a meeting using a tool like the Meeting Ticker to help you decide on meeting attendees and length.

You should plan for and ask all attendees to ensure an on-time departure:

That’s simple, straightforward and logical.  You can’t get to your destination without all the participants, so get yourself to the meeting on time and don’t keep people waiting.  Treat the meeting room like an airplane and close the door and get started at the appointed time.  If you’re one of those people who are chronically late to meetings, you need to ask yourself, why are you such a self-centered jerk? I don’t care if you’re the CIO or a lowly intern—don’t waste people’s time by making them wait.  It’s rude, it makes people angry, it costs money, and it says something about you.  Something not good.

Say NO to electronic devices:

Speaking of rude, there are few things worse than trying to run a meeting while someone is screwing around with their iPhone, completely detached from the discussion at hand.  Texting, Twittering, FaceBooking, emailing, playing games—it’s all inappropriate in a meeting, and it doesn’t matter if the topic of discussion at the moment doesn’t directly concern you.  Don’t rationalize away your bad behavior that way; it’s still inattentive, rude and inappropriate for a meeting.  Don’t even go for the vibrate setting because that’s a distraction as well.  Turn off the gadgets when the doors close and the meeting starts.  If you have trouble with this, then don’t even bring the gadgets into the room.

Limit your baggage:

Just as nobody likes an airline passenger that bring a steamer trunk on wheels for a carry-on, no one likes a meeting attendee that brings inappropriate baggage to a meeting, and in this case we’re talking about all the other kind of baggage.  Emotional baggage; axes to grind over duties, responsibilities, projects, timelines, workplace rivalries—that sort of thing.  Meetings are not the appropriate forum for tagging your workplace nemesis with a verbal zinger, or other forms of passive aggressive behavior.  Check your baggage at the door.

If it’s your meeting…  you’re the facilitator, manager, or boss, and you’re setting the time, date, place, duration, agenda, and tools to be used, this is for you:

Know your equipment and what to do when things go wrong:

Bear with me on this analogy…  It’s obvious that virtually no one listens to the flight attendant’s safety briefings or reads the passenger safety cards.  I would wager that 90% of air travelers could not open an aircraft emergency exit door in adverse circumstances if their life depended on it.  They honestly think that their experience as an occasional air traveler makes it unnecessary for them to prepare in any way for the flight they are on today.

Let’s say you’re on a plane today.  There’s a bird strike during the takeoff roll; the pilot slams the engines into reverse thrust and stands on the brakes to get the heavy jet stopped within the confines of the runway—it’s a rejected takeoff in pilot parlance.  The maximum braking effort transfers so much kinetic energy to the aircraft’s brakes that they catch fire.  Will you know what to do when the cabin fills with smoke and threatens the life of everyone aboard?  The evacuation order is given, but it’s now dark and smoky in the cabin.  Can you find the nearest door, or will your uncertain fumbling actually make things worse?  Can you open the door once you find it?  Do you know if the evacuation slide is automatically activated or if you have to do something to deploy it?

Or is your evacuation plan to simply follow the crowd and hope that others or the flight attendants handle the doors and slides and that everything  just works out for the best?

How about in your meeting?  Do you know your equipment?  Can you set up and run your laptop, projector, remote meeting software, room lights, telephone bridge and other needed tools competently?  If you’re unsure about how to do something, do you think that during the meeting is the time to figure it out, or that you should plead for help from your meeting attendees?  If you’re going to mark up, edit, or create a slideshow, spreadsheet, document or project plan, can you do that without flailing?  Do you know how to use highlighting, track changes, and other editing and collaboration tools so that everyone’s time is not wasted watching you struggle with the tools?

From a meeting management and leadership perspective, have you given sufficient thought to the agenda items and prepared for how you will guide the discussion?  Have you anticipated and planed for events and distracting topics or discussion tangents that could derail your meeting or divert you to an unintended destination?  How about how you’re going to deal with Negative Nancy, Passive-Aggressive Paul and Gloom-and-Doom Gary when they inevitably try to sabotage your project, your message or your meeting?  Do you have the necessary in-depth knowledge about your topics and are your facts current and correct?

What are you going to do when something goes wrong that you can’t fix?  The file server is down or the Internet connection stops working in the middle of your meeting; what will you do?  Just as on an aircraft you should know where your two closest doors are, how to find them in the dark and how to open them (even when they’re different kinds of doors), you need to have your contingency plans in mind before your meeting, and not wait until things go wrong.

And there’s a particular point to be made here about tools and technology: if you are a technical project lead, analyst or manager of any sort, don’t embarrass yourself, your subordinates and your organization by proving yourself to be technically inept with your meeting and collaboration tools.  The fact that you are not a coder does not mean you get to be technically illiterate.  You are not above taking a class at the local community college or otherwise taking advantage of training opportunities to learn a skill.  Learn the tools and put your proficiency confidently on display.

Lastly, pay attention to the basics:

Just as you should pay attention to the little red light and not get up to use the restroom on an airplane when the seat belt light is on, you should devote energy to being intellectually engaged in your meetings and not be caught napping, either figuratively or literally.

Pay attention to the conversations and exchange of information and ideas.  Engage and actively listen and participate.  Take responsibility for your action items.  If you’re the facilitator, restate points and summarize periodically to help keep your attendees involved and informed.  Also, make sure your attendees are up to speed before you deep-dive on any topic.  Summarize previous meetings, project plans and recent developments at the start of the meeting to get everybody on the same page.

We have arrived.  Please check to make sure you take all your bags with you, and have a nice stay at your destination.  Buh-Bye.