Manage-Wise

Turn meetings into discovery sessions

Ah, meetings. The reality of work that everyone loves to hate and most people complain about until they’re sick of their own whining. If only meetings could be done away with, everyone would be so much more productive.

Come on now. You know meetings are important, especially in our team-based business today. You know you get more out of some meetings than you ever could just by reading a report. And you know that meetings give you the opportunity to look good in front of people who matter. There are lots of legitimate reasons for having meetings. The problem is that these reasons tend to get lost as we scurry from one meeting to the next.

Weekly lineup

Let’s look at a typical weekly lineup.

It’s Monday morning. You’ve just arrived at work, and already you are due in a meeting. You grab a notebook and a cup of coffee and head down the hallway to your first meeting of the week. It’s a staff meeting, and it happens every Monday morning whether it needs to or not.

What happens in your staff meeting? You hear about last week’s doing involving your department. You talk about any company policies that may come into play this week. You review work in process and hear updates from your fellow department staffers. You may talk about a new hire soon to be part of your group. (Rarely do you talk about the newly departed. You wonder a little about this, but you shrug it off. That’s just the way things work here.)

Monday morning staff meetings always take an hour. Most times, they could be finished in ten minutes, so someone fills the allotted time with a complaint or a problem. This makes everyone else uncomfortable and impatient to get to their ‘real’ work, and by the time the meeting ends. Most staffers are crabby. No wonder people hate Monday mornings!

Tuesday is team meeting day. Team meetings are held to share client conversations and requests, to check progress on promises made to the client, to peek at profitability targets, and to investigate the competitive advantage that creativity gives us as we serve our clients. Go, team!

On Wednesday, we meet to talk about synergies between sales and production. These meetings are always testy. Someone invariably misunderstands something, and the loser is the client who doesn’t get what was promised on the date specified. Production complains that salespeople promise the moon when the best they could deliver is the piece of clay. Salespeople get impatient with the negative attitudes of production people and hold that even outrageous demands must be met because, after all, “If we don’t give our clients what they want, someone else will.”

On Thursday, we listen to presentations by potential new suppliers. These range from high-tech, big-wow companies to the newest consultant hawking team-building services. These meetings are usually fun, but rarely are the new companies added to our current stable of preferred suppliers. Nobody seems to know how to incorporate them.

On Friday, we meet informally in an ad hoc attempt to gauge our performance over the past week. Where did the time go?

Meetings chew up enormous chunks of time. But they’re necessary! And if we examine our frustration with them a little more closely, we’ll find that it exists largely because we lack the backbone to change the dynamics of our meetings or to recognise the opportunities for business mastery that each one offers.

Why we hate meetings

It’s popular to hate meetings. Heaven knows there are lots of reasons why, and here are some of the most common:

• We never know what to expect at this meeting
• Little meaningful information is shared. Meetings are simply bully pulpits for the company’s speech-makers
• They’re too long and unproductive
• There’s no agenda, so the meeting wanders aimlessly from point to point
• People in the room have a bad attitude toward the project or each other
• The meeting has no discernible expected outcome
• Once the meeting is done, nobody is sure what happened, what should happen next, by when it should happen, or who will make it happen.

People with backbone don’t waste time in hating meetings. They’ll tell you that each of these complaints has a solution. Require agendas. Set time limits for individual speakers. Fix bad attitudes, or change the players.

Excerpt from ‘How to Grow a Backbone’ by Susan Marshall. Reproduced with permission © 2005, Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company Limited.
Price: Rs 195. E-mail: vishwanath_mum@tatamcgraw-hill.com