Meetings – Understanding The Shapes and Roles

First in a series.

No matter where you are in the food chain, meetings are critical to success as a manager. It is important to know how to initiate, lead, and participate in meetings. This series of Management Notes on meetings addresses some basic concepts and skills.

But, first, lets start with some discussion of exactly what a meeting is and how meetings function in our organizational lives.

Meetings come in many forms: meetings in conference rooms, in the hallway or parking lot, or over lunch. Email, especially the emails with lengthy lists of recipients and responders, those seemingly endless threaded discussions, present a new form of “meeting”. Instant messaging and, more frequently in dispersed organizations, video conferencing are new forms of meetings.

Meetings can range in size from two people to thousands.

Meetings can be formal with agendas, moderators, chairpersons, and written rules of conduct. Meetings can also be informal, impromptu, and fluid.

Meetings serve a wide range of functions in an organization. Formal meetings may be just for the dissemination of organizational news, policies, or procedures. Formal meetings may also be information gathering, problem-solving, and task setting events. Formal meetings are frequently regular opportunities for teams to check the status and critical actions required to keep a project, business unit or whole organization on track.

Informal meetings provide opportunities for exchange of views on the state of the organization, queries for information, requests for comment, critique, new ideas, challenges to the existing beliefs about the organization, and so on.

In every case the culture of the organization is being displayed, exercised, and critiqued in meetings. Meetings display clearly what is valued and prized by the culture. The way in which people conduct themselves displays how the organization values people and the way in which people should interact. Meetings also are the key arena for the robust dialogue that keeps every organization faced towards the reality of its performance, its customers, the changing environment, and the competition. Meetings require candor and honesty to be effective.

This suggests that managers must pay close attention to how they personally perform in meetings, meetings of all types, and, perhaps, especially in the informal meetings.

This suggests further that effective managers understand how important it is to have meetings that are productive and carried out in a manner that reflects the most positive interactions between people.

Effective managers also see meetings as an opportunity to diagnose the health of business processes as well as the culture and an opportunity to change behavior and achieve better results.