Spending Your Intellectual Capital

Raise your hand if you find yourself in back-to-back meetings most days and end up totally mentally depleted when it comes time to do the thinking & creative work.

We are no strangers to a meeting-heavy work culture. In fact, we let it be the norm until the pandemic forced us into Zoom culture, where we finally started recognizing the toll that practice can take on our productivity and mental health. Zoom fatigue has been researched heavily in the last year and serious consequences have been identified. Zoom fatigue has highlighted what we've all known and simply let happen for decades. But I'm not hear to talk about Zoom fatigue as much as I'm here to address the acceptance of heavy meeting cultures and the impact on our effectiveness as leaders and producers.

In business, we talk about financial capital and human capital as normal as daylight, but we rarely talk about the intellectual capital that we spend and risk by the practices we normalize. Investopedia defines intellectual capital as "expertise of employees, organizational processes, and the sum of knowledge contained within the organization", but I pose we take this a step further. Much like we look at our assets as companies and determine how much money we have in the bank or how many human bodies we have as part of our team, we can look at intellectual capital as how much head space we have to think and do. When we have a meeting-heavy culture, our head space to think and do diminishes and our intellectual capital decreases.

When we create this culture of low intellectual capital, we create for ourselves several challenges as leaders.

1. Quality of Innovation Decreases - Our minds cannot rest enough or become undistracted enough to create exceptional innovative thinking. Sure, we may get by on innovation, but it's almost as a baseline rather than highly innovative thinking.
2. Level of Motivation Decreases - Burnout is very real, both physically and mentally. Physical burnout you can more easily bounce back from with PTO and Holidays, but mental burnout, including motivation, is harder to rebuild because you are thrusts back into the mental drain the minute you step back into the office (or virtual office). Not only is the day-to-day a drain on motivation, but the outlook for things getting better is a heavy weight to carry when trying to work through that day-to-day.
3. Amount of Fulfillment Declines - As an extension of motivation, the overall fulfillment a team member can possibly feel in a back-to-back meeting environment significantly decreases. When your intellectual capital gets spent going from meeting to meeting, discussing problem after problem, and planning for what needs to happen, you have nothing left to offer the thing you actually got into the business for - doing the work and being creative. It's a downward spiral from there wherein purpose and fulfillment come into question. The Great Resignation is no doubt an impact of this - people have gotten to their tipping point and now feel empowered to not fall victim to it.

Of course, there are a lot of other impacts when intellectual capital gets used up because of heavy meeting cultures. Everything from the mental health of team members who must then manage their emotions in challenging situations can become a larger team issue, all the way to the ability of teams to sustain quality output that impacts your bottom line - and everything in between. So if we recognize that heavy meeting cultures make it harder to have personal time, productive time and reduce burnout, why do we still do it? Well, because we THINK that's the only way to get the work done. But... it's not.

It comes back to leadership. Leadership at all levels sets the expectations for a culture. Trainings can be held for improving time management, but leadership must create a space in which applying new tactics and approaches is not only ok, but mandated consistently. Although I can't redesign every business plan and operational structure out there, I can offer a few thoughts on ways leaders can begin making moves. Here are just a few of many ways a meeting heavy culture can be addressed at the leadership level:

1. Mandate a limit to the number of meetings held each day.
2. Zoomless days are a trend worth trying on.
3. Consider re-setting expectations around response times.
4. Destigmatize slower response rates or number of meetings as a reflection of performance or employee investment.
5. If you're on billable time, allocate a bucket of hours each day to non-meeting personal development. But wait... that's not all. Take it a step further and make this a considerable portion of your employee timesheet breakdown. Further, do away with Billable/Nonbillable structures altogether to destigmatize this approach that makes employees feel like they cannot create those boundaries.

Ciara Ungar is a Certified Coach & Consultant, Author on Leadership, Teacher and Speaker. If you're looking to enhance key areas of your leadership and team development, connect to discuss more about her available services.