Hack Your Bureaucracy

A meeting with many participants is where everyone can see the enthusiasm of an executive for a specific initiative or project—and can see others moving to remove roadblocks. Witnessing senior executives champion your idea and peers commit to help, in person, can be a powerful signal to your colleagues, especially those skeptical or indifferent. But you don’t want to just hope to get lucky and have that kind of catalytic meeting; you have to do the hard work before and after. This may conflict with how you usually think about meetings: as places to show a presentation, make your case, and win over hearts and minds. Those activities are key to getting buy-in and support for your ideas—but we’re telling you that the place to do them is not in meetings. The real work happens outside the meetings—mostly before, but sometimes after. When you embrace this, you can change the outcomes in your favor.