We help leaders uncover and repair HIPPO problems by measuring two key behaviors. The first is talking time, how much the leader talks (versus other members). The second is the ratio of the questions the leader asks to the statements the leader makes. We worked with our Stanford colleague Kathryn Velcich to develop a “meeting audit,” which our students used to assess all-hands meetings at five early-stage start-ups.
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Others perhaps took it for granted that people knew to speak up. Our survey measure rated three behavioral attributes of leadership inclusiveness: one, leaders were approachable and accessible; two, leaders acknowledged their fallibility; and three, leaders proactively invited input from other staff, physicians, and nurses. The concept of leadership inclusiveness thus captures situational humility coupled with proactive inquiry (discussed in the next section).
You ask the members of the organization how close they are to others, where they go for advice, and who they regard as a source of knowledge and expertise. Alternatively, you can use passive measures, such as contextual email data: how many people you regularly connect with, how often, and how interconnected they are.
Leaders use the “ride-along” or “shadowing” method when they watch, follow, and question employees, customers, and citizens. This usually means going deeper than MBWA, which entails strolling around and having brief chats with people about their troubles. Taking the time to watch, talk to, and follow people as they try to do their work and struggle with the broken parts of an organization can shatter a leader’s delusions about the causes, costs, and cures for friction troubles.
When Rebecca launched Asana Labs in 2022, she was inspired by Armeetingeddon to recruit a small group of colleagues for a pilot program called Meeting Doomsday. All participants started by removing all standing meetings with five or fewer people from their calendars for forty-eight hours. They used the break to think about which meetings were valuable, deciding which to subtract, modify, or keep. As we detail later in this chapter, this prototype “meeting repair and removal” tool showed much promise. We worked with Rebecca to scale lessons from Meeting Doomsday to sixty employees who participated in the subsequent Meeting Reset program. We learned that people wanted a fine-grained but simple way to assess meetings. We asked them to use a three-point scale to rate how much effort each meeting required and its value for helping them achieve goals. Of over 1,100 standing meetings, those Asana employees rated more than 50 percent as low value and identified more than 150 that required great effort and had low value.
A piece for Harvard Business Review, “Meeting Overload Is a Fixable Problem,” provided a “playbook” for “meeting resets” that we helped develop and test.