Patrick Lencioni's Death by Meeting Leadership Fable

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Death By Meeting" by Patrick M. Lencioni. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.

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What is Patrick Lencioni’s Death by Meeting leadership fable about? How can you apply the tips in the book to make work meetings more productive and engaging?

Patrick Lencioni’s Death by Meeting leadership fable follows a CEO named Casey who leads long, boring, and unproductive meetings at his company. After Casey’s company is acquired, he is forced to improve his meetings or he could lose his job.

Keep reading to learn about Lencioni’s leadership fable and how to lead better meetings.

Death by Meeting Leadership Fable

Meetings are the lifeblood of an organization—they are central to its success but are also often seemingly useless and too long. This presents a paradox—how can you make meetings more productive when your staff views them as pointless? The answer is to make meetings better. Patrick Lencioni’s Death By Meeting leadership fable provides a roadmap to do so.

Author Patrick Lencioni illustrates how to make meetings more engaging and productive through the parable of Casey, a golf pro turned software developer who runs a sports gaming company called Yip Software. He’s a smart guy and generally a good boss, but he runs boring, unfocused meetings that deplete team morale. When he sells his company to become a subsidiary of a larger gaming company called Playsoft, a Playsoft executive named J.T. begins to attend Casey’s meetings and is shocked by the team’s lack of passion and urgency. It’s like they’re talking about a case study in business school rather than the future of their own company.

J.T. communicates to Casey that his job is at risk if he can’t focus his meetings better. Fearing for his livelihood, Casey huddles with his precocious assistant Will and devises a strategy to have more meetings and to fill them with movie-like drama. Just like in the movies, meetings have to have a hook—a good beginning that leaves participants willing to digest necessary plot exposition that might be a little slower. Consider discussing a budget: It sounds boring. But if you set it up correctly—by explaining the stakes in the line items and the competitors breathing down the company’s neck—people will be more willing to engage.

When J.T. returns to Yip to attend another meeting, he’s impressed by the transformation. Not only does Casey keep his job, but he makes his company more efficient and raises morale.

Casey isn’t the only executive who struggles to run productive meetings and engage his team. There are three significant issues with most meetings: A lack of drama, a lack of structure, and a lack of frequency.

Problem #1: No Drama in the Boring Meetings

Meetings are tedious. Given that most people sitting through meetings have other work that they could be doing, this is a huge issue, and it makes most employees resent meetings as a waste of their time. Meetings are tedious because there is no drama or tension within most meetings. In fact, most meeting leaders skirt tension if it exists.

Solutions

To solve this problem, actively look for disagreement or drama. This keeps meeting participants engaged and leads to important strategic discussions. If two people have a disagreement, backed up by data, it’s helpful for everyone to hear it, because it engages them and helps them form their own opinions about the company’s decisions.

In the leadership fable, Will thought of it like a screenplay. Screenwriters develop conflict and resolution over two hours. There are different kinds of conflict—from man versus a system in a movie like A Few Good Men to man versus nature, an unseen enemy, and himself in Apocalypse Now. Like movies, meetings often last two hours, but they lack everything that makes movies enjoyable, when in fact, meetings should be more fun than watching a movie.

You can interrupt the action at a meeting. If someone has a point that you disagree with, you can engage them in discussion.
Meetings are more relevant to our daily lives. They determine, in part, what we’ll be working on, how happy we are at work, how productive our work environment is, how much money we make, and how long our hours are.

Find a Hook

In every good movie, conflict starts within the first ten minutes. This is called the “hook”—it’s what draws people into the movie and makes them want to keep watching. A good meeting works the same way. A hook can take many forms, but it should explain the stakes. As the meeting leader, explain that the company is under threat, or that it’s struggling to make a dent in a new market, or that a bad decision could lead to these problems. Or, if you don’t want to start on a negative note, explain how a good decision could make life better for employees, clients, or the world.

Employees need a reason to care. Finding a hook is easy, because as we’ve illustrated, meetings do matter. They decide the direction of a company.

Find Conflict

After you’ve explained the stakes, look for disagreement. If there’s a group of reasonably smart people discussing an issue that they all care about (because of the hook), they’ll disagree on at least a small part of it. If you hear disagreement or even see on someone’s face that they’re unhappy with what’s going on, explore that. While people are often conflict-avoidant, when they do address an issue, they’ll almost always feel better, even if the ultimate decision doesn’t go their way.

Tell the team that you want conflict in meetings. However, people may still feel uncomfortable attacking their colleagues whom they respect. As a meeting leader, remind the team that what they’re doing is positive. Just a little bit of positive reinforcement goes a long way toward resolving tensions that could otherwise become personal and encouraging participants to have different opinions.

Problem #2: Poor Structure Creates Disengagement During Meetings

As we saw in the Death by Meeting fable, meetings are unproductive. They don’t yield any results that make people’s jobs easier or help the company make a big decision, so again, employees begin to resent them. This is because meetings are unfocused. People talk about various issues that don’t relate to one another. Most issues get short shrift while the team discusses others for far too long.

Patrick Lencioni’s Death by Meeting Leadership Fable