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MeetingsThatWorkThis week Johanna posted an article on managing group meetings: http://www.ayeconference.com/Articles/Managinggroupmeeting.html So have Steve http://www.stevenmsmith.com/weblog/2003_05_01_mpdarchive.htm#200309690 and Esther Seems like we all spent a lot of time in meetings at work, but many meetings are ineffective. Which leads me to ask: What sort of meetings work for you at work? What makes a meeting worthwhile? Which ones could you do without? How would you improve those if you could? -- Esther, earlier in the week. I was not the Phantom. I did forget to sign my name. Meetings that work for me are meetings that have a pre-announced purpose that I agree with, and then stick to that purpose and no other. Meetings that don't work for me are meetings that have no pre-announced purpose, or that have a purpose I don't agree with, or that don't stick to their pre-announced purpose, or have hidden purposes. I don't like meetings where I feel someone is trying to manipulate me. --ThePhantomReplier 2003.06.25 Dear Phantoms, I'm surprised by my own reaction to your signature lines. They annoy me. And my own reaction annoys me. Hmmm... Please carry on, What would have been your reaction if I would have replied as a Phantom? Curious. I posted the original "meetings that work" questions. And I forgot to sign my name. Someone (a phantom, I suppose) then signed the post with The Phantom Poster. I am NOT the phantom poster. Sometimes I forget to sign my name. (but not this time) Esther 062603 Esther, I wouldn't of had any reaction to a message without a signature. Hmmm... SteveSmith 2003.06.26 Here everything is cast in bits, not stone. Esther, I suggest you claim your, originally unsigned, post by changing the current signature to your own. You are a phantom no longer. FWIW, I am also not _the_ Phantom Poster, though I probably have been a phantom poster on occasion. It's strange, but I find the word Phantom to carry an archaic quality to it. What does that say about me? Or about the average age of this august group? MikeMelendez 2003.06.27 We're archaic and old. That does it. I'm going blond instead of gray. I refuse to look like an ancient jerk. I would rather look like a young jerk. (Ok, so this is off-topic. Back to meetings anytime you want.) For me, a worthwhile meeting is one where:
Mike, I'm pretty sure I chaired some meetings when we worked together at a previous client. I hope I did these things. If not, it's never too late for feedback :-) JohannaRothman 2003.06.27 We did, almost five years ago now. I was brand new to the company; you were about ready to move on to another consulting gig. The two meetings were team meetings intended to raise issues that needed to be escalated (you were the temporary manager). None of the items you note were followed as there were no specific agenda. The team members raised their own at the meeting. I'm not sure distributing minutes and action items would have been appropriate given the topics. So I don't think this is a criticism. Those two meetings met their purpose and everyone was encouraged to participate. Left out so far is the context of the meeting. I've worked at a company that posted, what I consider, a very reasonable set of guidelines for meetings in all conference rooms. A few years later, I was involved in a conversation, where a fellow engineer complained that meetings were so bad in one of his previous companies that the company had to post guidelines in the conference rooms, unfortunately without effect. I thought back with my usual 20/30 hindsight and noted that I had never experienced a good meeting at my previous company either. Generally, the senior two or three engineers discussed their issues and complimented each other (I use the 'i' not the 'e' form intentionally). Other participation, not specifically requested, was discouraged. So Esther's last question in the initial post is of particular concern to me. The only sometimes successful gambit I've used at dysfunctional meetings was to speak partially, indirectly and confusedly to one of the problems, if you will, a quiet jiggle. "What about this bit? I don't understand it. What am I missing?" But even that has warranted a putdown at meetings driven more by power than purpose. Much of my hair is gray and I'm proud to have earned every one of them. MikeMelendez 2003.06.27 Sorry guys, gray hair usually related to genes. I've been on the blond bandwagon for a decade. (yikes, over a decade!) esther 062703
A meeting that works advances the work of the organization. Dijkstra's aphorism about good programming, where "every statement advances the state of the computation" is a fine model for meetings, for project planning, for doing development and for a lot of other things. A meeting that works, as opposed to some other kind of work in the organization, is about some advancement of the work of the organization that is better done in a group than otherwise. If you're doing something that requires banging the gnomes together, well, you've got to get the gnomes in a room (or at least within arm's reach) to do so. It's not always decisions and action items. I like meetings with agenda and so on. Sometimes an appropriate agenda, however, is: "Muddle on this topic for a while." Figuring out that you don't agree and can't agree on some issue can be good work to do for the organization. So I like to identify a bit (if I can) what kind of meeting is going on:
In attending a meeting, I'm happier if someone tells me what work of the organization this meeting will advance, and ideally how my being there helps that along. I tend to do so when I instigate a meeting. That's another part of MeetingsThatWork, I think. I think the person who instigates a meeting is claiming that this meeting will advance the work of the organzation, and making a personal commitment to make this so. Or ought to be. Absent that claim and commitment, I tend to take meetings not real seriously. Nose counting and dancing attendance, for example. OK. You are huge. If you can afford to gather a pile of your staff together to do nothing but show that you can, obviously your department doesn't have enough work to do. -- JimBullock, 2003.06.27 (Is a phantom who signs posts as "phantom" truly anonymous?) This is, perhaps, only peripherally related, but I need the opportunity to vent feelings. My current client holds an all-hands "meeting" once a month. Not sure whether the term is appropriate. We (all fifty or so of us) are subjected to Powerpoint presentations from management, and treated to weakly alcoholic drinks afterwards. (How weak ? Well, most everyone prefers to leave right after the presentations, that's how weak.) One presentation I remember fondly was from the person in charge of the corporate Web site. Most of her slides were made up of highly detailed charts of site pages ranked by keyword popularity and referral rates. Well, she said that's what the charts showed. We had to take her word for it - it was all 2-point type or barely larger. Not sure what part of the "computation" this sort of thing could conceivably be thought to be advancing. I've managed to skip one out of three so far. I wonder what they'll be doing when (and if) the headcount rises to a hundred or five hundred ? LaurentBossavit 2003.06.28 Laurent, those meetings were advancing work by keeping some of the managers busy preparing 2-point powerpoint slides during the week, so they wouldn't be interfering with other work. James, if I want to be truly anonymous on this wiki, I would sign my name JimBullock, or some such. That's somewhat equivalent to people in meetings who say things like "some people are concerned about ..." but deny that they, personally, have any concern. That's something that doesn't work in meetings. - JerryWeinberg 2003.06.27
Not sure what part of the "computation" this sort of thing could conceivably be thought to be advancing. You might want to ask them this, perhaps worded a little differently. If we assume in retrospectives that whatever the results, people did the best they could, then these silly meetings are somebody's best idea. You might talk with them and find out what they are trying to accomplish. Then offer a better idea. -- JimBullock, 2003.06.27 (I'd just sign mine: "JerryWeinberg.") Is there anything wrong with a pep rally? Most all-hands meetings at small companies (with which I am familiar) served the main purpose to get everyone excited about the company and what is going on. In the eyes of upper management, perhaps 1 hour per month is not too much time to spend on morale-building. If only it were effective :-) --NotJimBullock #1 2003.06.28 Here is a pointer to another little paper that discusses yet another bad way to have meetings. DwaynePhillips 28 June 2003 I usually find "pep rally" meetings to be profoundly demotivating. The intent may be to motivate everybody, but the execution is usually on the motivator's terms, which seldom allow for there being personality types or motivations other than the motivator's. What motivates Sales and Marketing often falls flat with Engineering. (Letting extroverts plan company activities leads to similar problems. Extroverts usually plan things that are fun for other extroverts, driving some introverts into skipping the activities altogether.) --DaveSmith 2003.06.28 Dave, you mean you don't like participating in a mixer where we all run around trying to find someone who was born on the 13th of the month? Then someone pulls you aside and says, "Come on. We chose this because we knew it would be fun for everyone. Don't ruin it for the rest of us." Aargh! There are great advantages to being old enough or something or other enough to tell people, "no, thats okay, you guys go ahead without me." DwaynePhillips 29 June 2003 Add me to chorus -- "pep rallies" and "all hands meetings" that I have had the misfortune to attend were miserable and wasted my time. If you want to motivate me, use my time productively rather than squandering it. What sort of meetings work for you at work? What makes a meeting worthwhile? Which ones could you do without? How would you improve those if you could? What type of meeting is this? SteveSmith 2003.07.02 That's a great list, Steve. If you don't mind, I'd like to add the two unmentionable questions to it: What does this meeting cost? Ask those before and after the meeting. Of course, if you ask before, you might not have most meetings. Or, you might get fired. - JerryWeinberg 2003.07.04 I've done what Jerry suggests above (act surprised.) Back before Palm Pilots, some of the paper organizer vendors sold special forms for meetings. One example included a place to calculate the investment in the meeting, as well as the usual administrivia - outcomes, prep, and so on. Didn't get me fired. Got me uninvited to a bunch of meetings. That seems like a victory to me. Here are two more questions:
Lots of folks get invited to meetings who neither contribute, nor benefit. These two questions are also a wonderful way to flush out stealth agenda. "Well, George is invited so I have an ally in the meeting." "Fred gets some face time with the Big Boss." Interesting answers. There's a whole lot of information about the organization, the speaker, Fred, George, and the Big Boss in those two sentences. --- JimBullock, 2003.07.05 (Am I adding value here? Is is good for me to be here?) Well, these are good questions, Jim, but you have to have a standard of comparison. When I was on the university faculty, my standard was this:
I spent quit a bit of time picking up litter, and felt very good about my contributions. However, though I convinced many others that picking litter was definitely worth more to the university than attending a particular meeting, nobody ever joined me. Still, as Jim says, I counted it as a victory for me and the university both. - JerryWeinberg 2003.07.05 ROTFL. I'm adding that to my inventory of one-liners: "Well, is this more use than picking up litter around campus?" Brilliant. - JimBullock Jerry, Your comparison is beautiful. Thank you for sharing it. SteveSmith 2003.07.05 Personal Journal 3-July, Bellevue Background: My work group has a serious problem at XYZ (a customer). Management has brought in a product expert from outside the local area to solve the problem. Yesterday, Joel sent me and 10 other people an Outlook meeting request asking for participation in a daily 5-6PM conference call. The only information about the meeting is contained in the three word subject line. It says -- XYZ Daily De-brief I replied "tentative" to the request. I hoped an agenda might arrive before the meeting. My thinking was wishful -- nothing arrived today. I'll make a long story short. I called in at 4:57PM. Joel dialed-in about 5:07 after someone tracked him down. I asked Joel for the meeting's purpose and agenda. Silence. I asked for "structure". Silence. Some people babbled about the importance of "sharing". I hate that word. Joel said "you don't need to participate". I hung up. And Joel complains to me about being too busy. Yeah, he is busy -- producing nothing and tying up the time of the person who was brought in to solve the problem. SteveSmith 2003.07.05 Oh lord, Steve. From this and other tales it's clear that several folks in the organization you work for don't know what they're trying to do, or how to do it. Your story reminds me of three other "useful meeting tests."
-- JimBullock, 2003.07.06 (We have to start meeting like this.) A couple of jobs ago, our VP of Engineering would hold a weekly staff meeting for his direct reports. Or they were supposed to be weekly. During the year+ that I worked for him, meetings were cancelled with increasing regularity. And when we did have meetings, he felt compelled to take phone calls from the CEO or the VP or Sales (again, with increasing regularity). The company culture (from the Execs on down) was to never say "No" publically. People would seldom say "No" in meetings, including saying no to interruptions. The results were predicatable. --DaveSmith 2003.07.06
Updated: Sunday, July 6, 2003 |
