“But you can get so much more accomplished than when people are pointing in different directions.”īutterfield shared all this in a conversation recorded at the Annual Meeting in Davos this past May. Such work will never end for leaders and can’t be ignored, regardless of the person, project or phase.“Humans are really hard to to organize and coordinate and align,” said Butterfield. It’s something Butterfield says he’s always working on, knowing that the real coordination comes when you’re sick of hearing yourself say the same things. Repeating key messages – while it seems elementary – is critical to alignment. “You don’t want to get too bureaucratic about it, but actually setting some guidelines and some policies because there usually aren’t at most organizations.” 3. He suggests leaders consider how workaday processes like meetings could improve and develop guidelines, training and work these measures into onboarding to ensure they’re baked into company processes. Even at Slack, Butterfield said that he has spent far too much time in last decade on real estate leases, office buildouts and seating charts, when that time could have been invested in honing how teams get work done – helping workers become even more effective communicators and helping them run even more efficient meetings. While digital infrastructure has become more critical to productivity in recent years, physical infrastructure continues to steal a disproportionate share of attention. “If you could get rid of a third of meetings, collectively, you’re talking about billions of hours of people’s time per year.” 2. Many innovators have developed solutions for asynchronous meetings, tools where meetings are held as a sort of advanced recordings that can be paused or sped up with skimmable transcripts for some to scan for the insights most critical to their work. Most meetings today are run like they were pre-pandemic – workers, regardless of timezone – gather at a pre-appointed time and stop their work for a topic they may or may not be best positioned to contribute to. Here are some of the questions leaders can consider: 1. On the latest Meet The Leader, Slack CEO and co-founder Stewart Butterfield discussed how leaders could approach this next upheaval – and to consider what they’d change for their workers if they could change anything – making their teams more efficient and effective.

Stewart slack