What Shopify And Others Can Learn From Hayek About Corporate Meetings
Business meeting
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Shopify is banning employee meetings with three or more people, according to my Forbes colleague Jena McGregor. The ban is temporary, but chief operating officer Kaz Nejatian’s ongoing policies include no meetings on Wednesdays and large meetings only within a 6-hour block on Thursdays. The goal is to get workers back to doing things rather than sitting in wasteful meetings. The company has over 10,000 employees.
Hubris describes an executive who claims to know the best meeting policy for 10,000 plus employees. Some of those employees are up against a hard deadline. Others are brainstorming in the early stages of a project. One team may be implementing a well-known solution, while others are grappling with totally new technology. A single policy can hardly apply to all situations.
A good manager knows the people well. Alice gets into the ballpark of a great idea in a few minutes but is slow to get all the details right. Bradley seldom comes up with creative ideas but can lay out all the detailed steps that a project requires. The ideal meeting for this group of people may be different from ideal for different personalities working on the exact same problem.
The Nobel-winning economist Friedrich Hayek expounded on that in a very readable article, The Use of Knowledge in Society. He emphasized the importance of “the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place.” The chief operating officer of a large corporation does not know what a team of five people is working on, what their particular goals and challenges are, how they work together and what constraints they face. That knowledge is down in the trenches with the employees and their manager. They know what Hayek called “the particular circumstances.” It’s at that level that meeting decisions should be made.
To get the best possible results, managers should be evaluated on their teams’ performance, not on conformance to rules delivered from on high. Performance, though, is very difficult to measure. But dealing with that difficulty will produce much greater corporate results than micro-managing meetings.
Meetings can certainly be wasteful, as Nejatian understands. Senior leaders can add value by coaching subordinates in how to achieve the most productivity. It makes sense for people at the top to help other managers make better use of their staff members’ time. Good source material, such as Scott Human Resources’ 5 Steps to Better Meetings, can be circulated. Human resources departments can be sources of help, not just enforcers of rules and arbiters of disputes. But dictates from on high never understand the particulars of actual needs and opportunities.
