Disrupt your school’s approach to meetings: Make things better for everyone by showing the way
By Alan Robinson @RobinsonAlan
How many times have you sat in a meeting and thought about the impact you could be making somewhere else? I’ll bet the answer is: plenty. How many times have you led a meeting and felt the information you believe is vital isn’t being taken on board by attendees? The answer to that one is a bit more awkward but once you are honest enough to see yourself as an inexpert meeting leader, you can start to take steps towards improvement.
As most leadership research is based around business and some schools and trusts work on a Galactic Empire business model, we can pick up lessons from surveys beyond our hallowed halls. Senior leadership meetings take up 7,000 hours a year for the attendees, 64% of respondents feel that meetings interrupt deep thinking and only half of the meeting time is well spent. These figures come from the people I have mentioned in the rest of this article, please dive into their writing if rabbit-holes are as welcoming a shelter to you as they are to me.
In schools, we often schedule meetings in our timetabled blocs when departmental, pastoral or senior staff are free. Steven Rogelberg, the author of ‘The Surprising Science Of Meetings: How You Can Lead Your Team To Peak Performance’, suggests that booking out an hour for a meeting will result in that hour being filled, even if the initial needs are met inside half that time. That might be ok for you as the host to enjoy adult social interaction before seeing the Year 7 boys after lunch but there’s probably another person in that meeting just wishing it would end so they can prepare lessons, mark classwork or even just get to the toilet before their next class begins.
Speeding things up with an agenda, reducing the scheduled time to add pressure on attendees, and holding specific meeting types (problem-solving, decision-making, planning, status-reporting, and feedback) were amongst the elements noted by Terri Williams in the Economist. This structural change to existing corporate models, or rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, will only get you so far. Without a root and branch review, the potential slide back into old habits requires regular initial feedback which in the short term may actually increase meetings!
Perlow, Hadley, and Eun in HBR went beyond structuring meetings; they suggest systemic restructuring across the organization. At first glance you might think, “What can I do?” but you can actually be the change as a meeting organizer within your area of responsibility (if you’re lucky enough to have had that clearly defined in your school). Think of your effect as a butterfly flapping its wings, if that helps.
The initial requirement in starting this change is diagnostic. If you find that meetings are repetitive in content, too frequent in number, and take staff away from teaching or deep-thinking time that develops their professional ability then time is being wasted. Find out exactly how by listening to those you lead – this is based on the assumption that you have integrity, honesty, and are an authentic leader and if you’ve made it this far into the article, despite being labelled an inexpert meeting leader, then you are! Look at ways to collect data from each attendee and follow this by discussing the feedback collectively so you can all agree on goals, such as meeting-free times to increase personal productivity. Be SMART with progress and make sure you monitor it, then regularly debrief together.
In an ideal world, you will be able to schedule meetings after looking at your staff’s timetables and fit it in between meaningful wellbeing activities and stunning world-class pedagogical improvements in the multitudinous free periods that you seem to have in your well-functioning educational powerhouse environment. However, striking a real-life balance between what you want to achieve and what is possible without burning out either yourself or the other teachers is fundamental to your leadership challenge.
Aim for a collective and transparent approach with your team, including easy wins to celebrate and easy defeats to quickly fix and you will be able to change the culture of meetings under your watch. Do it well and publicise it in your school (remember that you’re going to have to be your own PR department, however distasteful that may seem to you as an authentic leader) so that other teams can see the benefits of your cultural shift. Teachers will see extra time to work on what is important to them while principals will see the cost- and time-saving methods that benefit the school.
Over the last year, I have worked on my line-management meetings as the guinea-pig to this new (for me) approach. Meetings were scheduled fortnightly but didn’t necessarily need to be held: there were 11 across the academic year. The agenda was discussed as a two-way conversation, milestones were set and progress was monitored at the next meeting. Some things just didn’t get done and we were both ok with that because we were focused on what we actually could do within our parameters of being functioning humans with lives outside of school. For my next trick, I need to look at getting heads of departments into meetings together in order to ensure that they use assessment data as a teaching tool. Wish me luck in my endeavours as I upscale my meeting disruption to a wider audience.
Alan Robinson is an Assistant Headteacher at a large all-through school in Abu Dhabi. Initially trained as a primary teacher at Stranmillis University College in Northern Ireland many moons ago, he has now experienced the joys of teaching English to amazing students from around the world. A former political researcher, Alan also teaches A Level UK Government and Politics. Follow him @RobinsonAlan