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How to Make our Meetings More Effective

In this article, Lauron Buys explores the purpose of meetings, the reasons why so many people hate meetings and provides us with viable solutions that will enable us to engage team members more effectively and achieve the goals we have set out to reach.

by Lauron Buys

The team at Lauron Buys Coaching Solutions cc are leaders-in-progress in their field. Lauron can be contacted on 031 262 8625 or at lauron@lbcoaching.co.za. For more information, please visit http://www.lbcoaching.co.za/

Are you in amongst the chorus of voices complaining about the number of meetings you are required to attend: When are we supposed to do our own work? Why are meetings necessary, anyway?

The purpose of meetings
My guess is that meetings are, first and foremost, a vehicle that enables teams and groups to communicate more effectively in the pursuit of a team’s shared goals. After all, what is the purpose of a team? Surely, it has to do with the need for a working unit to:

• Find quality solutions by making quality decisions;
• Agree on implementation of those solutions and decisions;
• Guarantee that implementation takes place;
• Be a source of learning for the team members. How long would we stay in a team if we weren’t learning anything?

Common problems
The above processes would usually need to take place in the presence of other team members, that is, in a meeting of some sort. So, what is it that bugs us about meetings? I think it comes down to three things:

• Too many (unnecessary) meetings;
• Meetings that go on too long;
• Ineffective meetings where we don’t seem to achieve much and we perhaps just use the old set of minutes as the agenda for the present meeting.

Viable solutions
These complaints provide us with some clues to the solution to our dilemma:

• Surely, if we ensured that we only convened meetings that were strictly required for defined reasons, an articulated purpose, it would make a difference.
• Many of the meetings we attend only really concern a couple of the team members, while the others just sit there wishing they were somewhere else. Our meetings will be much more effective if only those that need to be there are present.
• Why do we have to have weekly or monthly meetings for the sake of it? In this day and age, a lot of meetings can be conducted more effectively on a one-on-one basis.
• Emails can be used to convey a lot of the information and progress report.
• What about long meetings? Isn’t it true that whatever time we set aside for a meeting, we will use and often go overtime. Research has shown that if you reduce what is normally, say, an hour-long meeting to half an hour, people come to the meeting more prepared and they stick to the agenda in a more professional manner. This is the environment that we need in order to achieve the purpose of meetings and the purpose of our team.
• What if we were more mindful of what is discussed in meetings? We need to focus more on the future and the challenges we face in regard to the things we have to do, rather than report laboriously about the past. Many of us don’t give the meeting much thought until we are there. If we just thought about it for a change, we could make our meetings more meaningful. If the meetings we as managers hold for our teams were more meaningful, wouldn’t we deal in the meetings with most of the stuff that our team members are going to interrupt us with during the rest of the week?
• What do our meetings say about our leadership style and effectiveness? Who does most of the talking? Is the room structured in a way that encourages widespread participation (circles are good!) or in a way that accentuates us as chairperson (rectangles are not!)?
• Have we ever asked our teams whether they believe that our meetings achieve their purpose and how we could structure them better to achieve the purpose? How could their real needs shape the conversations that take place? How do each of our meetings assist in the development of the team? (Shouldn’t they?)

Seems to me that we may not have moved much from the meetings depicted in the John Cleese (of Faulty Towers fame) training video, Meetings, Meetings, Bloody Meetings! Or have we?

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