A useful meeting can accomplish so much. Great ideas can be brought to surface. Talents can be shared. Goals can be accomplished. Money has even been known to be exchanged. But not all meetings are useful meetings. And those are the meetings that give me the red ass.

Luckily, I have noticed one sure indicator that you are in the midst of a useless meeting.

The Useful Meeting Ingredients

To my mind there are a few qualifications that any useful meeting should satisfy. It should:

Have a goal or an agenda - Make the purpose of the meeting clear to everyone attending the meeting so there are no misunderstandings and no freeloaders showing up just for the punch and pie
Have an established meeting method - Whether you apply the Scrum method or some other meeting framework, the important thing is to have a framework to rely on in order to make the most of your time together
End with actionable items - Too many people leave meetings without feeling certain as to who is doing what. Publicly assigning action items in the meeting both clarifies this point and builds accountability
Follow-up with attendees afterwards - Accountability will never work without enforcement and that isn’t really possible unless good managers return to check progress on assigned action items

Any combination of these four elements will vastly improve the quality of your meetings. The fact is that most meetings are such poor examples of collaboration and communication that any one of these ingredients could revitalize the success rate of most meetings.

Sadly, even the best planned meetings can be suddenly and effectively derailed. Worse yet, the thing that derails your meeting could go completely unnoticed. Unless you listen for it that is.

The Dreaded Sound

Tell me if this sounds familiar: You have a project meeting and your entire team is in attendance. You’re checking off previous action items. You are planning future progress. And as discussion on some item begins, you hear it: the sound.

I am willing to bet that 99% of us wouldn’t think twice about it, but it was in that moment, with the utterance of that sound, that your meeting went to crap. And the sound? Nervous laughter.

That’s right. Nervous laughter is the sound a meeting makes when it dies. It is the moment when buy-in evaporates and you can no longer count on the full commitment of your team. It is literally the sound of something useful becoming useless.

If you think that I am wrong I challenge you to think of a single meeting where you heard a sad, timid “heh heh heeeeh.” Now tell me, how did that work out for you? I am willing to bet that things didn’t live up to your expectations.

How’s It Possible?

How can one little weak laugh cause so much calamity? The reason isn’t so surprising once you realize that nervous laughter isn’t the problem, it’s the symptom. And the disorder that nervous laughter is indicative of is poor “communication and trust.”

People express this one-two punch of dysfunction because they are told something that they do not agree with, but are not able to communicate that conflict. It could be that, as an individual, they lack the skills to properly communicate their concerns. But more likely they are laughing nervously because they do not trust their leader or team members enough to share their concern.

That lack of communication and trust is why the goal of your meeting is doomed. It is almost a certainty and you are almost guaranteed to not even notice in the heat of the meeting.

The Fix?

Asking a meeting leader to solve individual communication skills that are lacking may be unreasonable. But what a leader can do is pay attention and help people work to fully express themselves. Granted this is a little more work, but it is necessary for success. And the results? Nothing less than astounding by way of comparison.

Additionally, the meeting leader should work to create a meeting culture where “trust” is plainly evident. You may not be able to shape the culture of your entire corporation, but you definitely can guide the culture of your own meeting! Build a foundation of trust that your team can use to build great success!

As the new year rolls in, use 2020 to resolve the nervous laughter problem in every meeting you lead. If you are not a leader, just actively listen and see if you can do your part to help the nervous to better express their concerns.

Success is bound to explode if we all just pay attention and listen for the sound that a useless meeting makes. Trust me, there are plenty of opportunities in all our futures …