Nobody Reads the Pack, Nobody Speaks—So Why Have a Governance Meeting?

How many times have you painfully sat through a project governance meeting? Most of the people who turn up don’t even speak, no one has read the pack you sent out 3 days earlier and the project seems to move backwards after each meeting not forwards. What’s the point?

Spare a thought for the people attending your governance meeting. As a Project Manager you probably attend one governance meeting, most probably once a month. As an executive, you might be attending 2 or 3 governance meetings every week. When they’re not effective, that’s a lot of wasted time.

It’s on you to make your governance meetings effective. You have been put in charge of the project after all. It’s also worth the effort. Your meetings will stand out. Attendees will notice. And your project will thank you for it.

So let’s look at 3 of the biggest problems with project governance meetings and what to do about them.

Lack of engagement

You have this problem when people turn up to your meeting but don’t contribute, when people don’t turn up at all, when people turn up but see it as an hour to get their email done, or when people always send a delegate rather than turning up themselves.

To combat this

• Let your governance members know what you need from them. Let them know what role you want them to play. Be explicit, have the conversation.

• Share your governance reports early to give maximum time for members to read and understand the material. This will create deeper engagement.

• Have pre-governance meetings with key stakeholders and walk them through particular issues in the pack. Let them know specifically what role you want them to play on the particular issues in the pack. Prime them with questions and challenges to stimulate conversation across other members.

Lack of challenge

You have this problem when no one asks you questions, when the material you have presented is not challenged, when there are bad things happening and no one says anything.

To combat this

• Meet with your members and let them know that they are the custodian of the outcome. This is their result, not yours and they need to be interrogative of what is being achieved.

• Give members the approval to be interrogative. Tell them you prefer that style and that it adds value to the result. Often, people are not sure how this approach will be taken and sometimes you need to give permission for the approach.

• Create a particular agenda item to invite challenge. Tell people that you’re aware things are going well now, but you don’t want to be complacent so you want them to challenge you to make sure things continue to go well. Then be silent and let them ask their challenges.

Lack of impact

You have this problem when you don’t seem to make any traction on the things you wanted governance to support, when agreed actions from governance meetings don’t get done and when you’re bringing the same issue up to governance time and again.

To combat this

• Relegate the status reporting to the appendix. It’s hard to create impact through a sea of data that is not easily distilled to information. Not everyone is good at reading status reports and picking out the nuances.

• Pick two key things you want governance to make progress on. Describe each topic on a single page. Make this conversation take up 75% of your meeting.

• Discuss before the meeting that your intent is to hold a key discussion on two key topics and that the purpose is to get traction on those topics. Be clear to the governance members what you’re expecting from the meeting.

If you can get your governance meetings humming, several positive things will happen. You will get accolades from your members. They attend lots of governance meetings and they will notice that yours are different, yours are progressive. This will be good for your standing in the organisation. Secondly, your project will progress quicker. Key issues will be addresses. You will create traction more than other projects do. Finally, you will look forward to your governance meetings as an opportunity to take action.