Your Meeting Bill of Rights
Meetings are a requirement for a well-run business. They are a key part of a well-designed information flow for an impactful company.
We like to think that meetings fall into three categories:
- Well-run meetings are concise, directed, and have a positive impact on the business. They potentiate momentum and direction.
- Poorly run meetings are soul-crushing. They waste time and kill the creative spark of your best people.
- Irrelevant meetings can be perfectly run and may very well be interesting to the attendees, but are, ultimately, a waste of your life.
You are never going to reach a state where 100% of the meetings in your company are in the high-quality, well-run bucket. What you can do, however, is give your team a clear set of rules and empower them to opt out of meetings that don’t follow those rules. That’s what this Bill of Rights is about. It grants your team certain inalienable rights (or at least should) when it comes to meetings.
We think of this Bill of Rights as a cultural contract and expect you’ll need to update, extend, and tweak it to make sense for your company. We’d stress, though, keep it simple and direct – the goal here is to get everyone on the same page about what makes for a good meeting and what to do when you find yourself facing or in a bad one.
1. You Have The Right to an Agenda
You have a right to know what is being discussed before you attend a meeting. If no written agenda is provided in the calendar invite or at least 24 hours in advance, you have the right to decline the meeting. A meeting without an agenda is just talk. I like talking, but I don’t want to schedule time to do it. I want that over coffee, Slack, or alcohol – not on my corporate calendar.
2. You Have The Right to a Defined Role
You have a right to know why you are in the room for a given meeting. Are you there to make a decision? Are you there to help inform the problem or solution? Are you there to just be informed and kept in the loop? If the organizer cannot clearly articulate your role or what they specifically need from you, you have the right to decline. “Just in case” is not a valid reason to invite someone to a meeting.
3. You Have The Right To Start On Time
Time is the only non-renewable resource we have. You have a right to meetings that start and end on time. If a meeting consistently starts ten minutes late, it likely needs to be rescheduled to a better time. If the meeting runs past the scheduled end time without a collective agreement to extend, you have the right to leave. Your next commitment—even if it’s just “deep work”—is just as important.
4. You Have The Right to Appropriate Follow-Up
In general, when meetings matter, they produce artifacts and outcomes. You have a right to a written recap that outlines decisions made and action items assigned. If no recap is provided, you have the right to treat the meeting as non-binding. If it wasn’t worth writing down, it wasn’t worth doing.
5. You Have The Right to Relevance
You have a right to decline meetings where you are not essential to the outcome. This isn’t about being exclusionary; it’s about respecting the fact that your time is your most valuable contribution to the team, and if your presence isn’t strictly needed in a discussion or you have nothing to contribute, you generally don’t need to be there.
You have the right to decline “Optional” by default. If you mark me as optional, you should assume I will decline unless, in my judgment, it’s critical to be present.
6. You Have The Right TO Uniqueness
If you have multiple meetings on your calendar that are going to cover the same topic or are otherwise redundant, you have the right to attend only one of them, and an obligation to work with the organizer to address the redundancy. Obligation means you’re not allowed just to attend two redundant meetings and waste your time and other people’s time. Obligation means, yes, you actually need to coordinate with the people hosting the redundant meetings, figure out a plan to address the redundancy, and generally fix the issue.
7. You Have The Right to Prioritize High-Impact Work
Internal meetings are rarely the most important thing happening in a company. You have the right to use your best judgment to prioritize customer meetings, production incidents, or critical deliverables over meetings.
The “Internal Only” Clause
These rights apply to internal meetings only. You do not have the right to inform a customer that you aren’t attending their meeting because it doesn’t have an agenda.
That noted, you are encouraged to work with customers to help coach them on how meetings work. The tone and spirit of this are constructive, working with a customer to support them in how we can use everyone’s time more impactfully. “I want to make sure we make the most of our time today. Should we spend the first five minutes setting an agenda and aligning on the goals for this call?” That is leadership. Refusing to show up to a client call because of a “lack of process” is you being an asshole.
The Don’t Be An Asshole Clause
Nothing in the Bill of Rights gives you the right to be a legalistic, non-understanding asshole about anything herein. Life happens. People run late. People get overscheduled. All your rights and obligations here-in must be exercised as a kind, understanding human being. Sending an obnoxious, subject-line-only e-mail response with “No Agendee, No Attendee” replies to your peer who is trying to do their job is obnoxious. Be nice. Be gracious. A simple, “Hey, I’d love to join this, but I’m not sure what my role is. Could you add a quick agenda so I can prepare?” is the tone we’re looking for.
The Organizer’s Obligations
If you are the person who owns the meeting on the calendar, you are responsible for ensuring the conditions are properly set for people to attend. In general, that gives you three core obligations:
- Agenda and Requirements. You are responsible for the agenda, the desired outcome, and any pre-reads. If the team needs to read a document before they can contribute, send it early. Do not use the first 20 minutes of a 30-minute meeting to read a doc together.
- Be Thoughtful About Invites: Invite only the people required to achieve the outcome. Every extra person in a meeting adds an exponential layer of complexity and cost. If someone just needs to know the result, send them the notes.
- Follow-up: Within 24 hours, you publish the decisions and action items with clear owners and due dates. If you don’t do this, the meeting didn’t actually happen—it was just a conversation.
Scaling Management Autonomy
As a CEO, implementing a Meeting Bill of Rights is one of the fastest ways to build management autonomy. It forces your leaders to think critically about how they use their team’s time. It creates a culture where “busy” is not a badge of honor, but a sign of poor prioritization.
When your team knows they have the right to protect their time, they stop waiting for you to tell them what to do and start focusing on the outcomes that move the needle.
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