Start on time, end on time – always

OK, maybe not an absolute always. But pretty close. This will feel like one of those, no duh, leadership principles. But how often do you actually do it? How often do you actually pull it through? How often do you say in a meeting that is running over, "Oh, it's OK, I can go another couple of minutes; I'll just text my team that I'm going to be five minutes late." Or, maybe in your organization and your team, it's become so loose that everybody just shows up five or ten minutes late. And then you actually don't start the hour-long meeting until thirteen minutes after the official "start time."

This is even more rampant now in the hybrid or virtual environment. This is because we don't have the water cooler time that we used to have when everyone showed up at the office, so you want to check in with the team and throw out the question, "How's your day going?"

And you know what? You should ask that question. It's super important. Actually, I think it's critically important. I don't think you can box that out of meetings. Otherwise, we become all about tasks and not enough about relationships. And for clarity, and honesty, and confession, I am a task person more than I'm a relational person. But I've trained myself and learned over time that relationships are the most important thing in the world. So, even though I am task-oriented, more than relationally oriented, I know we need to carve out the appropriate time in a meeting for relationship maintenance and growth.

Back to the principle: Start and end your meetings on time. By doing this, you are fighting for clarity, you are fighting for efficiency, you are fighting for alignment, and you are fighting for organizational health (if you bake in the "How's your day going?" into the agenda, which you should). When you follow this principle, you are showing up prepared and ready to do what you and everybody else in the meeting agreed to do. You decided to start at a specific time, cover a certain amount of topics, and end on time. It's that simple and straightforward, but it's soooo easy to blow it off.

One qualifier: If you don't get it done in the prescribed time, which can happen sometimes, then you push the incomplete topics and business to a different time / different meeting. But you're not going to show up late, ill-prepared, and spinning on two wheels instead of four wheels into your next meeting, where everybody has to suffer because of your inability to follow an agenda.  

I have said multiple times in these articles that confession is good for the soul. Here's a confession: I used to be great at starting and stopping my meetings on time (and sticking to the agenda in between), and now I've become bad at this. How did this creep into my life where I'm not executing this with excellence? I've wondered this because I tell all my clients to always have an agenda and always start and stop their meetings on time.  So, lately, I have been reflecting on why I am so off with this principle.

I think I have my finger on it, and I'm doing a significant correction right now across the board with all of my meetings. The culprit? I am trying to jam twenty pounds of relational agenda items and task-oriented stuff into a ten-pound bag. It just isn't working. I've lost my way on this. I used to know my way. I used to have this thing dialed in. It goes back to my military days when I was in an elite unit. We would tell/promise the highest levels of the military that we could be deployed anywhere in the world within 24 hours, and within thirty seconds of the requested time. Yes, within thirty seconds. We would brag how we could be there, on target and on time, with the exact firepower and warfighting skills that were needed to execute. But the principle has slipped away from me.

I want to get back to it. By starting and ending my meetings on time (with an agenda that all participants have ahead of time), I am fighting for the highest possible good for the people I am in the meeting with. I show up ready, buttoned up, ready to dive into relational stuff, ready to dive into tasks, all with an expectation to get it all done in the time allotted. I don't believe in good luck getting through a meeting on time; instead, I believe in preparation.

I need to be more prepared, and I know that I'm not alone. Lax meeting agenda specifics and wobbly start/stop times have become an epidemic in the business world. Retooling your mindset around this could have many benefits that will level up your meetings, teamwork, and business. This is not striving for perfection; rather, it is striving for a regular best practice that you deliver on – and then you occasionally visit the exceptions and the non-absolutes where you are "late" to a meeting. You owe this to yourself, you owe this to your team, you owe this to your direct reports, and you owe this to your boss. Start on time, and end on time – always.