Feeling lonely today? Let’s call a meeting.

Suddenly, one of the partners, chuckled and gained the floor (not too difficult with only three people in a Skype videoconference). He recalled an earlier job in a medium size technology firm where the standing joke among the engineers concerning management was, “These guys seem to operate on the principle, ‘Feeling lonely today? Let’s call a meeting.’ “

After we all laughed a bit we once again returned to the ugly reality that most managers still do not conduct meetings following even the basics of best management practices. They do not ask what the meeting is about, what are the deliverables to be expected? Who actually needs to be at the meeting? Do we have enough information, data, to hold this meeting? Do we have a reasonable expectation that we can reach some actionable conclusions that will lead to real tasks with real outcomes? Or, is this just another meeting held ritually to review the status of projects? The moto of this approach to meetings is lets get everyone in the room and kick things around until the day has passed and everyone is bored to death.

Meetings are the lifeblood of organizations. Plan them as though blood will flow.

Meetings are the lifeblood of organizations. But, they need to be conducted as if blood was literally being spent in the process.

His story reminded me of my own experiences with meetings. Here is one that is germane to Mr. Downs’ story.

I used Stand Up Meetings for staff.

In my first use in a Inside Sales/ Engineering Support department with sixty people on staff, I met every day at 8am sharp. Six managers plus the office manager attended. The rules were:

• everyone stands up, no leaning on walls
• rotating chair of the meeting amongst the managers
• if you can’t attend, your backup from your group will attend
• no status reporting
• only critical situations requiring help are discussed
• you are expected to seek out help in advance of the meeting
• request for help must specify who is responsible, what needs to get done, when it it needs to be completed, and the required results

These meetings generally lasted ten minutes or less. Standing up reinforced the brevity and focused attention on getting to the important. The rule requiring seeking help in advance encouraged people to network around the organization, including other departments. The rotating chair gave everyone more experience leading meetings and meant that when I was called away by my bosses (this happened at least once a week), the meeting went ahead.

After a couple of days of shake down, everyone came to really like this format, everyone excepting those who had been struggling to be at work at 8 am sharp. The meeting gave each manager an opportunity to get help they needed and improved their sense that they were in control of a frequently hectic environment.

A side benefit of this meeting that I discovered was that it tended to jump start the day. If you needed to settle in and get your bearings at the beginning of the day (and who doesn’t), you had to arrive a bit earlier. The meeting and the active discussion of business began at 8 am sharp every day.

I found that I had to demonstrate my own focus around the purpose of the meeting. Early on I found myself interjecting little requests of various managers about issues that I needed to take up with them. For example, “Patricia, see me at the end of the meeting to talk about the balancing of the telephone loads in your group.” This kind of off point talk from me lead to others doing the same thing. This lead to longer meetings and got the focus off  the critical issues of the day.

Think of meetings as dramas. Meetings should follow the basic shape of almost all dramas and movies. Act One sets the scene and hooks us into the action, introduces the characters, tells us what the drama is about, provides us with all of the information that allows us to participate. The Act Two is conflict. Discussions break out, issues parsed, pruned, and analyzed. The Act Three is resolution. The culprit gets his comeuppance, the love interest is played out, and so on.

In the world of organizations, the resolution, Act Three,  is usually a set of tasks.  Those accountable are clearly noted, deadlines set, resources committed, metrics for success defined, and the date for follow-up put on the calendar.

In a business drama, every formal meeting needs to have an objective, an agenda, time, place, leader, and participants. All of this must be made available to everyone involved before the meeting takes place. This provides the participants with time to review the agenda, gather information, think about the problem, in short, get ready to participate and not just appear at the meeting.

The leader of a meeting needs to think through each act. A key element of Act One is the hook. Everyone must understand very early in the meeting that something significant is at stake. This draws them into the meeting and gets them ready to participate vigorously.

Once you have applied this dramatic model to your formal meetings, think about how you can apply this to the informal meetings. Frequently, in contrast to formal meetings where Act One is critical, informal meetings fall down on Act Three, the resolution. How often do you walk away from a casual conversation about a project problem and wonder “What was that about and who is really responsible for bringing closure to the problem?”

First things first – most meetings should not take place.

Any meeting that is about the status of, or problems with, a regular business process or activity is an indicator that you should solve the process problem. Good processes provide status indicators that can be seen by whomever needs to know, without a meeting. Recurrent problems should be eliminated, not treated as a moment for management to rush in to save the day. If you are in charge of, or have influence over a process that is producing meetings, then take those meetings as a directive for you to get to work on fixing the process.

Now is a good point to note that meetings don’t just take place in conference rooms. When a person in your department stops you in the hallway, or props themselves up outside your doorway, and says, “Can we talk about the Big Bonanza Project?”, you are about to have a meeting. When there is a flurry or emails and instant messages about a project, customer, or whatever, you are having a meeting.

Beware of meetings that you as a manger generate. Ask yourself whether your meetings fall into the categories noted above. Be disciplined about any meeting where the key outcome is to “keep you in the loop”.

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.