Meetings Mean Misalignment

I’ve worked in organisations with a single north star goal that applies to everyone, and ones that have multiple goals that cascade down to the team level.

I’ve observed that organisations with trickledown goals have more meetings than those with a single north star goal. I contend that meetings are a symptom of misalignment.

Let me explain. In the organisation with a single northstar goal, everyone is working towards the same thing. We could make a cross team call on what our priorities were, then we would pair synchronously on these to hit our goal within the sprint.

By working synchronously on a shared goal with a short horizon, we were able to effectively work without meetings.

In IT I was either creating or optimising membership growth channels, or I was making our operations more efficient. We understood how much a new member equated in terms of profit, so we could costs equivalise our cost savings into membership growth numbers. This way I had one goal.

With that one goal, it was simple to arbitrate between competing priorities across teams. If I needed prioritisation support my management could tell me who they throught I’d have the best chance of succeeding with. We were data driven, so in time new leaders emerged that were trusted to set realistic, and immediately tangible goals.

In organisations wtih trickledown goals, as seems to be promoted by CultureAmp and the HR literature behind it, I’ve observed a game of broken telephone down the hierarchy that results in different teams and individuals having different priorities.

When priorities are misaligned, external teams and people aren’t investing day to day effort on your goals. Instead you hope to get a meeting in a week, but that’s lucky because Calendars are booked solid. When that meeting does occur, its often about scheduling work or sending people away to do their homework.

I see a million different balls getting chased, and instead of the organisation acting as a single entity on a focussed outcome, it behaves stressed out and chaotic, borderline schitzophrenic.

This happens by degrees in every organisation. At the root of it is a leaders desire to please their own leaders and all stakeholders. They over promise in a bid to appear effective. In organisations that aren’t data driven, or have a confusing cacophony of goals, these leaders get ahead, because there is no measured accountability, or too many things to measure.

These organisations spend all their time in meetings, and little time actually delivering.