Effectively Meeting

Meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything.

John Kenneth Galbraith

Isn’t it the truth? Meetings, meetings meetings! We seem to be always attending but never accomplishing. I can’t start to describe the number of useless meetings that I have attended throughout my career. I would be surprised if you didn’t feel the same way.

One particularly bad example from early in my career comes to mind. The organization I worked for hired a new director for our department - a director who had something to prove. She could have earned respect by doing what was right for the company but instead she demanded it. She demonstrated that she had the power to insist on respect by throwing her political weight around.

One way that she did this was by calling meetings - meetings that were compulsory, meetings where attendance was taken. But most importantly, meetings without any purpose other than to prove her power.

Now at the time I was working flex-hours. I came in every morning two hours early so that I could take Friday afternoons off. The company was already getting a good deal from me. I worked an extra two hours per day times five days a week or 10 hours per week to start my weekend early by four hours. It wasn’t the best deal but I was willing to put in the extra hours because the Friday afternoons were important to me. I wanted the company to realize that they were getting a good deal so they would leave it alone.

One Friday morning an email arrived from the new director’s office. Everyone was to clear their schedule. A crucial meeting was being called for 4:00pm that afternoon. Everyone had to attend for an important announcement.

I already had plans for the afternoon (it was after all the summer) but if this was crucial I was willing to stay – after all, I was a part of the team. I also wanted the organization to know that I was willing to be flexible about my Friday afternoons so they wouldn’t change the status quo.

4:00 pm arrived and the entire department showed up. Now its fifteen years later so I can’t remember the exact numbers - but it was in the neighborhood of 5 managers with 10 team members each.

She started the meeting promptly 30 minutes late and introduced us to a practice she had developed at her previous employer – the Friday afternoon meeting. She told us that she didn’t have an agenda but that she found it a nice way to “wind the week down” by calling a meeting every Friday afternoon.

The follow two hours were filled with nothing more than her pontificating about life, business and anything else that entered her mind.

What was the purpose of the meeting? Obviously it wasn’t business related. The organization did not benefit. She was either making sure that she established control over her domain or she was gratifying her ego by holding her team hostage.

What did she accomplish? She managed to do nothing more than lose the respect of her staff and waste a lot of time and money.

Let’s try to quantify how much money she wasted – at least in terms of salaries.

The salaries are going to be my best estimates for that time.

In attendance she had

IT/IS Professionals – approximate annual salary $45,000 – or an hourly rate of $22.00
IT/IS Managers – approximate annual salary $65,000 – or an hourly rate of $33.00
Herself, Director – approximate annual salary $85,000 – or an hourly rate of $42.00

That works out as:

50 Staff x $22.00 x 2 hours = $2200.00
5 Managers x $33.00 x 2 hours = $330.00
1 Director x $42.00 x 2 hours = $42.00

Total = $2572.00

That is a significant waste considering it was going solely to her ego. Unfortunately the situation is a little worse than that.

First: The people in attendance weren’t sitting by waiting for something to do. They already had a multitude of projects that were being neglected while she established control.

Second: She wasn’t even wasting the organization’s time and money – she was wasting the employee’s. The normal end of the day for the organization was 5:00 pm. She kept everyone a full 1-1/2 hours past that time. So, essentially three quarters of the time she wasted was stolen from the employees. That is a total of $1929.00 stolen from them.

Finally: This was not a once only occurrence. She called these meaningless meetings for the remainder of the summer. 10 Fridays x $2,572.00 = $25,720.00 in wasted time.

Now, am I telling you all of this just to rant? No, if I did that then I would be wasting your time in a similar manner. I am telling you this to start “painting the mental image” that we have been talking about. I want to have your start feeling the frustration that the employees in this team felt and in the process grab your attention.

Obviously my former director demonstrated how not to hold meetings – so that leads to the obvious question, “How should one go about holding an effective meeting?” So no, unlike this director I don’t want to waste your time – I want to help you use it more effectively. In this case I’m going to do that by providing you with some information about conducting effective meetings. Now I’ve given you an extreme example of how meetings can be meaningless and wasteful. What I want to do is provide you with some meaningful information – some guidelines that you can use to make sure that your meetings are productive rather than wasteful.

You may be asking yourself, “What do meetings have to do with public speaking?” The simple answer is a lot. As we have previously discussed public speaking is about presenting your ideas in a convincing manner as to motivate, influence, and inspire others – that is leadership. Meetings are a venue for such presentations.

If you are able to compose and articulate your thoughts in a convincing manner from public speaking skills then you are going to be more effective in meetings as well. But we need to make sure that meetings are structured in a manner so that they promote productivity as well. That’s what this series of articles is going to encourage.

 

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Copyright © 2007 David Mudie
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Effectively Meeting