We must stop meeting like this...

"We're Here Because We're Here" (World War One song)

Question: are meetings necessary?

Actually, you will recall that we discussed this at our last meeting, and if you look at the minutes you'll see it referred to in matters arising, section 4, sub-section B, point 15. Ah yes, we decided to postpone a decision on this until after we've heard back from the special working sub-group-committee-party on meetings, who will be meeting in the next week or so, just as soon as everyone involved can clear some time away from other meetings in their diaries.

The meetings you initiate are indeed necessary. Vital. But the ones other people arrange aren't.

OK, so that's hardly an acceptable answer to the question. Managers, especially middle managers,  are bogged down, tied up and beaten to submission by the number of meetings they have to attend. It may be that going to meetings feels like such an intrinsic part of your job (on a par with writing and receiving emails) that you couldn't imagine life without them. And yet you dream of the productivity that not going to meetings would unleash. 

The truth is that no meeting is either good or bad, per se. Without careful consideration of both the context and the skills shown by all in attendance (not just the convener or chair), pretty much every meeting you go to has the potential to derail. What's worse, just like email, people find themselves cc-ed into meetings for no apparent reason. 

Let's just examine the whole field for a moment. What is a meeting? A meeting could be any situation where two or more people come across each other, whether by chance or by prior arrangement, and in some way acknowledge their existence. That definition would include many situations not covered here; the chance conversation in the corridor, over lunch, or in the street, as well as the more organised sessions of the classroom, workshop or conference. These are all fine, but I'm looking at business or management gatherings, deliberately convened, with set parameters and agreed rights or obligations to attend. Such meetings come in different types:

Informational                         organised for the express purpose to transfer, broadcast or dissemination of information. These are best run to fixed time scheduled of less than an hour (the max.), and preferably between 20 and 30 minutes. Short briefings (think of those prologues to Hill Street Blues)  

Major or decisional              organised so that those attending can participate in coming to a conclusion, reaching a decision or setting the grounds for others to do so outside the meeting. 

Status or progress                 these should be organised to further a task, manage a correction, or and are ad hoc to a particular project or process.

Ritual                                       there is a category of meeting that is almost entirely a matter of formality, appearance, or etiquette. Such ritual meetings may be very important in the life of an organisation and are likely to quite occasional (no pun intended). 

So far, so good. But people (most of them) hate meetings. Why? The first reason is that they take up too much of the working day/week/month. Even if they were all fantastic, there are just too many of them. But that's not the only problem - many meetings are awful. In fact, there are several pathologies associated with meetings. These are:

1. Type confusion            is this meeting to hear about something, discuss something that needs to be fixed, decide something? A meeting that tries to be too many things (or fails to ask why it's there). What's needed here are boundaries.

2. Role confusion            why am I here? Who's in charge? Why are you here? Why isn't head of x/y/z here? Why is everyone's ego on show? Is you ego on the agenda? 

3. Matters arising           this may just be in academia, but minutes can turn into hours (pun intended) and spending 80% of the time allocated to meet catching up with what's happened since the last one can't be healthy...

4. Meetings that should be emails         (the opposite of "emails that should be meetings")                      tricky one, this. Informational meetings need to serve a social/cultural purpose. If they don't, when all that really matters is getting the content of the update out in the open, then why waste everyone's time making them sit in a room together?

What are the alternatives? What can you do to cope?  Some people have got wise to how meetings work. In a few cases, this means fixing the meeting before it happens (which happens a lot more than you'd expect at senior levels of management), whilst in others the tactic is to attend only for a limited amount of time, then leave.  My own coping strategy since 2010 has been not to get invited to meetings in the first place.

In the end, maybe the point is that sometimes courage is needed to say 'we must stop meeting like this..'