The Meaning of Meetings
Most of us, at some point in our professional lives, have come across at least one book or article or workshop on how to conduct a meeting. One example is the "Meeting Bill of Rights," proposed by Dru Scott in her book How to Put More Time in Your Life. The "Meeting Bill of Rights" affirms that everyone involved in a meeting is entitled to know in advance (1) the meeting objective, (2) what question the meeting should answer, (3) what each participant is expected to contribute, and (4) what time the meeting will be over.
Although other sources may go into more detail on these points, Scott's work exemplifies the focus of most of what has been written and taught about meetings. This focus is a "how" orientation: how meetings should be conducted.
But relatively little has been said concerning why meetings are conducted in the first place. Why do mature, mentally healthy human beings spend so much time getting together in what are frequently poorly ventilated (and/or poorly heated) smoke-filled rooms? What purpose is fulfill when we schedule hours of our time in an activity that few of us understand and most of us say we don't like?
People in organizations hold a lot of meetings. The average white-collar worker will spend approximately thirty thousand hours in meetings during his or her working career. Depending on how you calculate it, this figure represents from one-third to almost one-half of all the working hours for such a person.
Meetings, therefore, appear to have a very high priority in the lives of many people. I noted earlier that it is human nature to rebel against meaningless activity. If we are forced into such activity, we feel "slightly crazy." Is this, maybe, why meetings bother us so much? Do meetings make any sense? Do meetings have any meaning, and if so, what is it?
In this chapter, I would like to suggest first why meetings are such a fact of organizational life.
Then I shall point out two very important organizational values that are served by meetings. Finally, at the end of the chapter, I shall offer a few comments on how we can shape our meetings so that they better serve these values. U-standing the "why" of meetings, maybe we'll feel less crazy when we find ourselves in one.
THE "WHY" OF MEETINGS
Meetings fulfill a deep human need. George Kelly, John Dewey, Martin Buber, and other noted commentators on the human condition have all observed that face-to-face meetings hold together the world of human reality. Together, people construct language, value systems, and codes of behavior that define "the world."
The reality of any organization is constructed and validated by its individual members. Coming together, these members define goals, affirm values, and establish, as well as reinforce, systems of behavior.
In other words, meetings provide an opportunity for the formation of community. Community serves to unite the values and goals of the individuals with each other and with those of the organization. If there were no meetings in the place where I work, few, if any, community would not form, and my attachment to my place of work would diminish.
Meetings, and the opportunity they provide for the building of community, are especially important where work is focused around what political theorist Langdon Winner calls "information machines." The American workplace is changing from primarily product-oriented companies to information-oriented institutions. Currently, 85 percent of all jobs in America involve some form of information processing.
As we spend more of our time with information machines, the danger arises that we shall spend less time with each other. As Winner observes, "Developments like electronic news, education, banking and even work, all available through information machines, create a strong impetus for people to dwell within themselves and not reach out."
Yet members of an organization need to reach out and interact if they are going to construct the commonly supported values, goals, and structures that will define their place of work as a reality for them. Without such interaction, the organization is only "virtual" in the minds of its employees, a fiction with little claim to productivity or loyalty.
Most of us are aware of the need for human interaction in the workplace. This need is most acute in workplaces dominated by information machines. I find it no accident that most of the complaints I receive about "too many meetings" come from persons working in "high-tech" or "information" industries.
Workers on the assembly line or at the construction site, even on the department-store floor, don't seem to call as many meetings. They don't need to schedule formal opportunities to interact. Their workday is filled interaction. One might say (as some supervisors wryly do) that in these settings, the workday is, in fact, one big meeting!
But for employees in high-tech, the bulk of their work activities involve interaction with machines, not people. Over time, working ''alone'' can create the illusion that I work in an isolated, self-contained world. My conception of "the organization" becomes paler and paler. My connection to the organization becomes weaker and weaker .
At some level, managers sense the need for interaction among work-team members. And so they address this need in the only way they know how. They call meetings.
A good example of this syndrome came to my attention when I was conducting an organizational assessment for a division of a major computer firm several years ago. The focus of this division was on planning, finance, and research. Thus, virtually every employee had a computer terminal at his or her workstation. E-mail, on-line data bases, facsimile devices, and "superphones" all combined to make this facility a wonder of the information age.
The assessment design called for the interviewing of thirty middle-and upper-level managers. From these interviews, as well as other measures subsequently administered, a strong and overriding theme emerged. You guessed it. Too many meetings.
Meetings accounted for nearly 60 percent of the managers' on-site time. Their primary concern, therefore, was not the quality of the meeting, that is, how effectively they were run. Their problem concern was the sheer quantity of meetings. As one participant quipped, "It's hard to juggle the time in meetings with the time to do the stuff that's decided in meetings, if anything."
Now it's interesting to note that in most cases of "excessive meetings," the very same people who are complaining about the number of meetings are also the people who are calling meetings. So it was in this case. Upon exploring the "why" of the meetings, nearly every participant discovered that the usual reason he or she called a meeting was to get "buy in."
Buy in was used in this firm to describe the process of getting as many people as possible involved in every decision. A high value was placed on "buy in" in this division. When we explored the "why" of this value priority, we found that many staff members were very concerned that, given the intrinsically isolated nature of their jobs, they could easily fall into making completely unilateral decisions. Unilateral decisions troubled the managers not only because such decisions would probably be based on too narrow a body of information but also because unilateral decisions carried unilateral responsibility if the decisions went wrong.
Moreover, by calling meetings, ostensibly for "buy in," people got a chance to chat with their colleagues and find out what was going on. They couldn't do this poring over data at their workstations, and the culture of the firm frowned on drop-in office visits.
So the problem of excessive meetings masked two other, more fundamental, problems: (1) managers' reluctance to take responsibility for unilateral decisions and (2) everyone's need to get together. By bringing the work team's values to the surface, we also developed ways to address these problems. First, the awesome telecommunications equipment at their disposal could be used to get "buy in" on decisions without calling a meeting. In fact, sending requests for comments and suggestions over the terminals gave the recipients of those requests more time to reflect on the response. This, in turn, would provide a higher level of feedback than ideas thought up on the spur of the moment at a meeting.
But what about the need to "get together"? Well, the suggestion arose to schedule monthly staff birthday parties and seasonal department or sectionwide lunches as a way to get together. The groups had never had time for such "social amenities" before: they were too busy going to meetings.
Finally, division members acknowledged that some decisions were most efficiently made unilaterally, on their own. They dealt with the need to take individual responsibility in some cases and to avoid dumping on a person if things went wrong.
WEDDING THE VALUES OF ACTION AND RELATING
Action and relating are two values essential to organizational effectiveness. Every organization must get things done-hopefully, things that support its values and goals. In addition, every organization must provide opportunities for its members to relate to one another. Through these relationships, common meanings, understandings, and systems are constructed that define and validate the reality of the organization for its members.
Both the god of action and the goddess of relating are served by meetings. Meetings give us an opportunity to get things done and interact all at the same time. Unfortunately, this wedded pair is almost always battling. At any given meeting, the action faction angrily tries to get things going while the relating coalition stubbornly holds to getting people (or at least their ideas and values) together.
The opposing goals of "hanging out" versus "getting on with it" are in almost constant contention for ascendancy at meetings. However, I would like to suggest that good meetings, like good marriages, are achieved by maintaining a balance, a unity of these opposites.
In this unity, each partner maintains the distinctive attributes that are his or her strong points, at the same time melding with the strong points of the other for the greater enhancement of both. The god of action is goal-oriented. When he is in a balanced state, he contributes the very desirable quality of decisiveness to meetings. The goddess of relating is process-oriented. When she is in a balanced state, she contributes the very desirable quality of sensitivity to meetings. Thus, when the couple is in harmony, a meeting flows smoothly, with decisiveness and sensitivity. A wonderful experience.
However, when either action or relating pushes for ascendancy (that is, pushes to take over the meeting), it also pushes the pair into imbalance. And the experience of the meeting, like the experience of being privy to any marital dispute, is uncomfortable, to say the least. When the god of action takes over in a meeting, people feel bulldozed. Decisions get pushed to premature closure. Participants become resentful, distant, and resistant to implementing any solutions that get "agreed" upon.
On the other hand, when the goddess of relating takes over a meeting, people feel bored. Discussions dwell on feelings, attitudes, and beliefs. Few decisions are made. Participants feel aimless and frustrated.
What steps, then, can we take to keep action and relating in harmony and avoid imbalances in our meetings?
SOME MARRIAGE COUNSELING FOR MEETINGS
The best way to balance the god of action when he gets out of hand is to structure meetings for effective relating. And the best way to balance the goddess of relating when she gets out of hand is to structure meetings for effective action.
First, to structure a meeting for effective relating:
1. Draw out the silent members of the group. Ask for their opinions, not facts. Asking for facts may simply put them on the spot.
2. Control the garrulous. When someone rambles on, pick up a phrase he or she utters as an excuse for cutting in and offer the phrase to someone else with a "What are your thoughts on that?"
3. Protect the weak. Commend contributions from junior members of the team.
4. Encourage the clash of ideas. (But discourage The clash of personalities.)
5. Avoid the "suggestion-squashing" reflex. One problem with suggestions in meetings is that they are easier to ridicule than facts or opinions. So take special note and show special warmth when anyone makes a suggestion. Pick out the best parts of suggestions and get other members to help build them into some-thing that might work. Finally, if another member of the meeting shows the squashing reflex, ask the squasher to produce a better suggestion,
Second, to structure a meeting for effective action:
1. Appoint a timekeeper to clearly announce when the meeting time is one-half elapsed, three-quarters elapsed, and five minutes from its scheduled ending time.
2. Clearly state the purpose of the meeting at its start. Meetings are held for the following purposes:
• Decision making
• Recommendations
• Preliminary deliberations
• Approval
• Information sharing
3. At the close of the meeting, make a summary statement of what was agreed upon. Have this statement appear in the minutes. Include the names of persons responsible for future action.
4. Conduct a two-week experiment in "meeting control andcost reduction":
• Reduce all meetings to one-half their normally scheduled time.
• Prohibit the scheduling of back-to-back meetings. Everyone must have at least thirty minutes between meetings.
• Allow anyone who wishes to leave a meeting to do so, without penalty, when the timekeeper announces that the scheduled time for the meeting's end has arrived.
• Institute the "ten-minute meeting." Hold it in an area with no chairs. Permit no smoking, drinking, or eating.
At the end of the experiment, you may have reshaped the course of your department's over-relating, underacting meeting behavior. You may also have gotten a lot of people riled up. But as Susan Streeker commented in her article "No more mad meetings," . . . "It's time to rethink the way time, space and money are being sacrificed on the altar of the conference table."
THE MAIN POINT
Meetings can be successfully organized by focusing first, not on how to run the meeting, but rather on why we are calling the meeting in the first place. Meetings are of importance to organizations because they support the value of action ("getting things done") and the value of relating ("getting together and getting things understood"). The effective meeting is a happy marriage of the two.
http://www.wisdomforwork.com/site/page/pg1357-pn_What_Meetings_Mean.html
Most of us, at some point in our professional lives, have come across at least one book or article or workshop on how to conduct a meeting. One example is the "Meeting Bill of Rights," proposed by Dru Scott in her book How to Put More Time in Your Life. The "Meeting Bill of Rights" affirms that everyone involved in a meeting is entitled to know in advance (1) the meeting objective, (2) what question the meeting should answer, (3) what each participant is expected to contribute, and (4) what time the meeting will be over.
Although other sources may go into more detail on these points, Scott's work exemplifies the focus of most of what has been written and taught about meetings. This focus is a "how" orientation: how meetings should be conducted.
But relatively little has been said concerning why meetings are conducted in the first place. Why do mature, mentally healthy human beings spend so much time getting together in what are frequently poorly ventilated (and/or poorly heated) smoke-filled rooms? What purpose is fulfill when we schedule hours of our time in an activity that few of us understand and most of us say we don't like?
People in organizations hold a lot of meetings. The average white-collar worker will spend approximately thirty thousand hours in meetings during his or her working career. Depending on how you calculate it, this figure represents from one-third to almost one-half of all the working hours for such a person.
Meetings, therefore, appear to have a very high priority in the lives of many people. I noted earlier that it is human nature to rebel against meaningless activity. If we are forced into such activity, we feel "slightly crazy." Is this, maybe, why meetings bother us so much? Do meetings make any sense? Do meetings have any meaning, and if so, what is it?
In this chapter, I would like to suggest first why meetings are such a fact of organizational life.
Then I shall point out two very important organizational values that are served by meetings. Finally, at the end of the chapter, I shall offer a few comments on how we can shape our meetings so that they better serve these values. U-standing the "why" of meetings, maybe we'll feel less crazy when we find ourselves in one.
THE "WHY" OF MEETINGS
Meetings fulfill a deep human need. George Kelly, John Dewey, Martin Buber, and other noted commentators on the human condition have all observed that face-to-face meetings hold together the world of human reality. Together, people construct language, value systems, and codes of behavior that define "the world."
The reality of any organization is constructed and validated by its individual members. Coming together, these members define goals, affirm values, and establish, as well as reinforce, systems of behavior.
In other words, meetings provide an opportunity for the formation of community. Community serves to unite the values and goals of the individuals with each other and with those of the organization. If there were no meetings in the place where I work, few, if any, community would not form, and my attachment to my place of work would diminish.
Meetings, and the opportunity they provide for the building of community, are especially important where work is focused around what political theorist Langdon Winner calls "information machines." The American workplace is changing from primarily product-oriented companies to information-oriented institutions. Currently, 85 percent of all jobs in America involve some form of information processing.
As we spend more of our time with information machines, the danger arises that we shall spend less time with each other. As Winner observes, "Developments like electronic news, education, banking and even work, all available through information machines, create a strong impetus for people to dwell within themselves and not reach out."
Yet members of an organization need to reach out and interact if they are going to construct the commonly supported values, goals, and structures that will define their place of work as a reality for them. Without such interaction, the organization is only "virtual" in the minds of its employees, a fiction with little claim to productivity or loyalty.
Most of us are aware of the need for human interaction in the workplace. This need is most acute in workplaces dominated by information machines. I find it no accident that most of the complaints I receive about "too many meetings" come from persons working in "high-tech" or "information" industries.
Workers on the assembly line or at the construction site, even on the department-store floor, don't seem to call as many meetings. They don't need to schedule formal opportunities to interact. Their workday is filled interaction. One might say (as some supervisors wryly do) that in these settings, the workday is, in fact, one big meeting!
But for employees in high-tech, the bulk of their work activities involve interaction with machines, not people. Over time, working ''alone'' can create the illusion that I work in an isolated, self-contained world. My conception of "the organization" becomes paler and paler. My connection to the organization becomes weaker and weaker .
At some level, managers sense the need for interaction among work-team members. And so they address this need in the only way they know how. They call meetings.
A good example of this syndrome came to my attention when I was conducting an organizational assessment for a division of a major computer firm several years ago. The focus of this division was on planning, finance, and research. Thus, virtually every employee had a computer terminal at his or her workstation. E-mail, on-line data bases, facsimile devices, and "superphones" all combined to make this facility a wonder of the information age.
The assessment design called for the interviewing of thirty middle-and upper-level managers. From these interviews, as well as other measures subsequently administered, a strong and overriding theme emerged. You guessed it. Too many meetings.
Meetings accounted for nearly 60 percent of the managers' on-site time. Their primary concern, therefore, was not the quality of the meeting, that is, how effectively they were run. Their problem concern was the sheer quantity of meetings. As one participant quipped, "It's hard to juggle the time in meetings with the time to do the stuff that's decided in meetings, if anything."
Now it's interesting to note that in most cases of "excessive meetings," the very same people who are complaining about the number of meetings are also the people who are calling meetings. So it was in this case. Upon exploring the "why" of the meetings, nearly every participant discovered that the usual reason he or she called a meeting was to get "buy in."
Buy in was used in this firm to describe the process of getting as many people as possible involved in every decision. A high value was placed on "buy in" in this division. When we explored the "why" of this value priority, we found that many staff members were very concerned that, given the intrinsically isolated nature of their jobs, they could easily fall into making completely unilateral decisions. Unilateral decisions troubled the managers not only because such decisions would probably be based on too narrow a body of information but also because unilateral decisions carried unilateral responsibility if the decisions went wrong.
Moreover, by calling meetings, ostensibly for "buy in," people got a chance to chat with their colleagues and find out what was going on. They couldn't do this poring over data at their workstations, and the culture of the firm frowned on drop-in office visits.
So the problem of excessive meetings masked two other, more fundamental, problems: (1) managers' reluctance to take responsibility for unilateral decisions and (2) everyone's need to get together. By bringing the work team's values to the surface, we also developed ways to address these problems. First, the awesome telecommunications equipment at their disposal could be used to get "buy in" on decisions without calling a meeting. In fact, sending requests for comments and suggestions over the terminals gave the recipients of those requests more time to reflect on the response. This, in turn, would provide a higher level of feedback than ideas thought up on the spur of the moment at a meeting.
But what about the need to "get together"? Well, the suggestion arose to schedule monthly staff birthday parties and seasonal department or sectionwide lunches as a way to get together. The groups had never had time for such "social amenities" before: they were too busy going to meetings.
Finally, division members acknowledged that some decisions were most efficiently made unilaterally, on their own. They dealt with the need to take individual responsibility in some cases and to avoid dumping on a person if things went wrong.
WEDDING THE VALUES OF ACTION AND RELATING
Action and relating are two values essential to organizational effectiveness. Every organization must get things done-hopefully, things that support its values and goals. In addition, every organization must provide opportunities for its members to relate to one another. Through these relationships, common meanings, understandings, and systems are constructed that define and validate the reality of the organization for its members.
Both the god of action and the goddess of relating are served by meetings. Meetings give us an opportunity to get things done and interact all at the same time. Unfortunately, this wedded pair is almost always battling. At any given meeting, the action faction angrily tries to get things going while the relating coalition stubbornly holds to getting people (or at least their ideas and values) together.
The opposing goals of "hanging out" versus "getting on with it" are in almost constant contention for ascendancy at meetings. However, I would like to suggest that good meetings, like good marriages, are achieved by maintaining a balance, a unity of these opposites.
In this unity, each partner maintains the distinctive attributes that are his or her strong points, at the same time melding with the strong points of the other for the greater enhancement of both. The god of action is goal-oriented. When he is in a balanced state, he contributes the very desirable quality of decisiveness to meetings. The goddess of relating is process-oriented. When she is in a balanced state, she contributes the very desirable quality of sensitivity to meetings. Thus, when the couple is in harmony, a meeting flows smoothly, with decisiveness and sensitivity. A wonderful experience.
However, when either action or relating pushes for ascendancy (that is, pushes to take over the meeting), it also pushes the pair into imbalance. And the experience of the meeting, like the experience of being privy to any marital dispute, is uncomfortable, to say the least. When the god of action takes over in a meeting, people feel bulldozed. Decisions get pushed to premature closure. Participants become resentful, distant, and resistant to implementing any solutions that get "agreed" upon.
On the other hand, when the goddess of relating takes over a meeting, people feel bored. Discussions dwell on feelings, attitudes, and beliefs. Few decisions are made. Participants feel aimless and frustrated.
What steps, then, can we take to keep action and relating in harmony and avoid imbalances in our meetings?
SOME MARRIAGE COUNSELING FOR MEETINGS
The best way to balance the god of action when he gets out of hand is to structure meetings for effective relating. And the best way to balance the goddess of relating when she gets out of hand is to structure meetings for effective action.
First, to structure a meeting for effective relating:
1. Draw out the silent members of the group. Ask for their opinions, not facts. Asking for facts may simply put them on the spot.
2. Control the garrulous. When someone rambles on, pick up a phrase he or she utters as an excuse for cutting in and offer the phrase to someone else with a "What are your thoughts on that?"
3. Protect the weak. Commend contributions from junior members of the team.
4. Encourage the clash of ideas. (But discourage The clash of personalities.)
5. Avoid the "suggestion-squashing" reflex. One problem with suggestions in meetings is that they are easier to ridicule than facts or opinions. So take special note and show special warmth when anyone makes a suggestion. Pick out the best parts of suggestions and get other members to help build them into some-thing that might work. Finally, if another member of the meeting shows the squashing reflex, ask the squasher to produce a better suggestion,
Second, to structure a meeting for effective action:
1. Appoint a timekeeper to clearly announce when the meeting time is one-half elapsed, three-quarters elapsed, and five minutes from its scheduled ending time.
2. Clearly state the purpose of the meeting at its start. Meetings are held for the following purposes:
• Decision making
• Recommendations
• Preliminary deliberations
• Approval
• Information sharing
3. At the close of the meeting, make a summary statement of what was agreed upon. Have this statement appear in the minutes. Include the names of persons responsible for future action.
4. Conduct a two-week experiment in "meeting control andcost reduction":
• Reduce all meetings to one-half their normally scheduled time.
• Prohibit the scheduling of back-to-back meetings. Everyone must have at least thirty minutes between meetings.
• Allow anyone who wishes to leave a meeting to do so, without penalty, when the timekeeper announces that the scheduled time for the meeting's end has arrived.
• Institute the "ten-minute meeting." Hold it in an area with no chairs. Permit no smoking, drinking, or eating.
At the end of the experiment, you may have reshaped the course of your department's over-relating, underacting meeting behavior. You may also have gotten a lot of people riled up. But as Susan Streeker commented in her article "No more mad meetings," . . . "It's time to rethink the way time, space and money are being sacrificed on the altar of the conference table."
THE MAIN POINT
Meetings can be successfully organized by focusing first, not on how to run the meeting, but rather on why we are calling the meeting in the first place. Meetings are of importance to organizations because they support the value of action ("getting things done") and the value of relating ("getting together and getting things understood"). The effective meeting is a happy marriage of the two.
http://www.wisdomforwork.com/site/page/pg1357-pn_What_Meetings_Mean.html
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