“Tell me about your boring meetings,” I asked. Megan and I had been talking about why her meetings were real sleepers.

“Every week, on Monday, we get together and I go over the production runs for the week with all my supervisors. I talk about the problems I know about, like if materials are going to be late or whatever. It takes about 20-30 minutes, but it seems like a real waste of time. It doesn’t prevent any problems and we almost always miss our production goals for the week.”

“Megan, when do you know what your production runs should be?” She looked surprised at the question.

“Well, I know, almost a month in advance from the sales forecast. Sometimes we have last minute special orders, but those are usually small, no big deal.”

“I want you to rearrange your meeting like this. All your supervisors use email, right?” She nodded. “Friday, before the Monday meeting, I want you to email out the total production required for each of the products you have to run. In the email, tell your supervisors to come, on Monday, prepared to report to the rest of the team how they have scheduled their department to meet that production. Tell your purchasing guy to show up and explain what materials will arrive and when. Tell your inventory guy to show up with his list of materials on-hand.

“Tell the team, they have 30 minutes to sort things out, then go around the table asking for short one minute reports. You might have to go around the table more than once. Other than calling on your supervisors to report, you don’t say a thing.”

It was a very different meeting. -TF