Andrew Buck over at the Project Hut has a post today on Meeting Behaviors: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
It’s a good post, but it oversimplifies in a few areas. More specifically, it falls into the trap of “all meetings have the same purpose.”
Ain’t true.
Buck’s comments are dead on for many meetings, but there’s more than one type. Here’s a chart I’ve used in various talks:
Meetings are either to inform or discuss, and the content involves either many or few of the participants; see below. (This is a bit of an oversimplification, of course. It also excludes classes and training, which are meetings of a sort.)
Meetings-to-inform can indeed benefit from Buck’s suggestions. These are the most common type in corporate America… and the most frustrating, because the participants know it can be better even if they’re not sure how to get there.
Dilemma meetings should be “taken outside.” When two or three participants spend time debating an item that doesn’t concern the others in the room, the person with power in the room should cut the conversation off — politely — after a minute or two, suggesting that the participants take it up separately.
What if the person with power is one of the participants?
- Good leaders recognize the situation and move themselves to table the matter after a few minutes.
- Occasionally it’s both urgent and important — and this is the only time the participants will be together in the near future. A good leader should briefly explain and apologize before continuing with the dilemma… but a good leader also builds a good team that probably recognizes the situation.
- Sometimes the administrative assistant can actually step up to note that the leader is getting off on a tangent. This works only if (a) there’s an agenda or (b) there’s a clear purpose; see below.
So-called strategy meetings — a/k/a brainstorming sessions — need not an agenda but a purpose, almost a vision for the meeting. The chair of the meeting should not be the leader; the leader and facilitator roles should be kept separate in these types of meetings. In addition, it may take considerable time to try to formulate a point; what may seem a “windbag” in a status meeting can be highly valuable thinking aloud in a brainstorming session.
Three Mistakes
- All meetings are structurally alike, or should be structurally similar. See above.
- All meetings need a detailed agenda. (The “agenda” for a brainstorming session may technically be called that, but — other than reminding people of the time limit and the purpose — it’s not a meeting agenda.)
- Meetings should end on time.
#3 is a trick answer. Most meetings should end at least five minutes before the scheduled end time. Give people time to get to their next meeting, give some time to clear the conference room and get the folks for the next meeting in place to start on time, and recognize that post-meeting sidebar conversations or colloquies themselves will take a few minutes and should be allowed for.
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Bill Gates used to hold a regular meeting with his leadership team that was really a rolling series of dilemma meetings. Five or six people/groups would in turn present an item and discuss it with Bill, Steve Ballmer, and some other key senior execs. Here it was understood that (a) it’s hard to get all these folks together and even harder to get your idea in front of them; (b) you could learn quite a bit by listening to Bill and Steve critique or discuss someone else’s idea; (c) it would have been distracting for different groups to come in and out at different times, and Bill wanted agenda flexibility so they could have extended dilemma discussions if need be; and (d) people wanted to see if Bill was going to tear into someone… other than them.
Actually, I never saw Bill tear into someone… just into their ideas. Even that was more mythical than commonplace. (One of my all-time favorite Microsoft internal videos — not available on YouTube, unfortunately — was a funny sketch showing a team trying to sell Bill on Version 2 of Microsoft Bob. He didn’t say a word, and you never actually saw him, but it was priceless watching the team’s faces as they realized the presentation perhaps wasn’t going… um… quite as well as they’d hoped.)
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Here’s a transcription of part of one of my talks discussing the graphic shown above .
I want meetings where everyone comes out at least a little bit smarter. To get there, we need to recognize that not all meetings are the same. On one axis, what’s the purpose? Is it to inform, or to discuss something? On the other axis, how many participants does it involve? Most everyone in the room? Or just two or three of the attendees?
The high-value quadrant is a rich group discussion. Strategy and planning sessions. Brainstorming. Group budgeting or resource allocation. There’s an art to making these meetings effective, and it starts with everyone understanding the purpose.
So let’s look at the next quadrant. Here one person is informing the others in the room. Perhaps a manager sharing news with her reports, or the group comptroller with a budget update. To be of high value, the news must concern most of the attendees. There may be Q&A and discussion, and meetings in this quadrant may sometimes gracefully slide into the upper left – as long as everyone is aware of the shift.
Lower right is low value, but not zero value – as long as these are short. The most common form is an employee sharing information with peers. You don’t want too many of these, but brief sessions are effective at keeping the team on the same page. Consider stand-up meetings for this quadrant – where, literally, everyone is standing. Keeps the meeting short! Stand-up meetings have become quite popular in agile software development. Just don’t do too many of them, or drag them out.
Detailed discussions involving just a few of the participants – that’s bad news. Don’t drag the whole group into colloquies or dilemmas. Keep dilemmas off the agenda. If you realize a discussion or update or report-out is turning into one of these soul-swallowing monsters, deflect it to one-on-one time.
