Meetings aren't your enemy

For many, meetings are seen as a waste of time, a chance to flex egos, as blockers or to delay action. And this goes double for cyber security meetings, where many think an email would have covered it.

But meetings aren’t your enemy. ?

They are the foundation of a good business, as they provide an opportunity for people with different skill sets to get together and solve problems and present ideas. I suggest the problem of badly received meetings lies in a lack of knowledge about meeting governance and etiquette within the cyber security field.

We don’t really train in how to run effective meetings, and therefore within the industry many of the meetings are simply ineffective.?

If you’re organising a meeting you need to know what the objective is. In my mind there are three basic meeting types with very different objectives.

Informative Meetings

Informative meetings are less interactive than some of the other meeting types but have the objective of presenting information about a project or activity, enabling the participants to discuss their opinions and objections at a later date.

Normally informative meetings take the form of a presentation with an opportunity for questions at the end. There is often information for the attendees to take away in the form of notes or handouts.

These meetings can also be larger than discursive or decisive meetings, with more of an ‘auditorium’ than a ‘round table’ approach and therefore the logistics of ensuring the room and audio/visual equipment are suitable for the number of people attending can be challenging.

Discursive Meetings

Donuts, snacks, coffee. Seriously, provide them all.

Discursive meetings can be long, passionate and controversial. But to remain manageable they need to be small groups, even if this means chairing a dozen separate meetings for six attendees rather than one meeting for seventy participants. It will be far more productive, even though it does require extra work for the organiser.

These meetings provide the opportunity for attendees to bring their knowledge, skills, opinions and ideas to the table to have a discussion or a debate that will eventually lead to a decision being possible.

Minutes are not generally taken for these meetings, and participants are encouraged to take their own notes. However, the chair is essential to keep the conversation on track, as well as to help keep tempers from fraying.

Decisive Meetings

The point of a decisive meeting is to make decisions, and therefore can be short and sweet. They can consist of a show of hands for an either/or decision, or they can be about choosing or proposing a particular course of action.

However, it is important during these meetings that discussions and debates are completed before the decision is made.

Therefore, you can either have a separate meeting for debate, and a separate meeting for the decision or ensure there are clear points on the agenda separating the two.

The agenda for a decisive meeting can simply consist of a table of decisions to be made, a column of attendees with tick boxes against their name (where votes are not secret) to mark for, against, and abstained.

The result needs to be minuted in detail, recording any objections and what the overall vote was.

Setting a clear agenda for the meeting, ensures that it achieves the objective and that no one feels like their time was wasted. Using such a clear-cut structure means I have been able to reduce meetings from two-hour arguments with no decisions, to 30-minute sessions where every item on the agenda was covered and everyone knew what they had achieved.

Hybrid Meetings

Although these are three very clear meeting types, in some situations there may not be a need for a separate meeting and instead all three could be addressed in one. But only if the agenda makes it very clear that this is going to happen. For example:

• When calling for a decision, the chair needs to make sure everyone understands the time for discussion is over.
• During a discursive item timing needs to be restricted, and if it goes over then it should be deferred to another meeting date.
• Ensuring ‘Any Other Business’ only discusses items sent to the chair prior to the meeting and prior to the agenda being set (there should be a clear time and date for additions). Anything raised at the meeting should be placed onto the next agenda.

The Role of the Chair

Regardless of the type of meeting the chair is a vital participant and their key role is:

• To keep the meeting flowing according to the agenda
• To keep to time
• To ensure meeting etiquette is adhered to (speaking at certain times, raising hand to speak, not interrupting, introducing yourself before speaking).

However, the chair is not ‘in charge’ of the discussion or the topic. They are there to ensure the discussion is open and fair, everyone who wants to speak is able to, the meeting discussion is not dominated by one person and that everything on the agenda is covered in a timely manner.

As such, the chair should be (during the meeting at the very least) as impartial as possible. Many organisations with formal constitutions will give the chair a vote only in the event of a tie to help enforce this.

Prior to the meeting the chair (and the clerk if you have one) is responsible for setting the agenda, which gives them a degree of control over the direction of an organisation, so it is important they are well-informed of anything being raised.

The Role of the Clerk

The role of the clerk or the secretary is an equally important one, as they deal with the administration of the meetings which includes logistics of the meeting itself, as well as aiding the chair with setting the agenda.

However, their most important role is the accurate minute-taking during the meetings (especially those where decisions are made). Minutes act as the legal record of the meeting and are therefore important.

The clerk or secretary is also able to check up on actions and ensure they have been done before the follow-up meeting, as nothing wastes time more than the same people not doing their actions and it being discussed again and again.

Getting it Right

A well-organised, productive meeting is one that has been prepared for, is formalised with an agenda and a chair that doesn’t mind enforcing it, as well as the meeting rules they’ve put in place.

Whilst informal meetings may promote the “family workplace,” at the end of the day, we want meetings to be less of a distraction from work and instead a time where stuff gets done.?