Managing Leadership^®

Meetings. They are, of course, an essential tool for managers and workers to consider options, plan programs, coordinate activity, and assess progress.

But there are at least three problems with meetings. These are related to decision-making, accountability, and control.

Let’s take a brief look at the first one, today.

Meetings are often unconsciously used as yet another, but extremely costly, vehicle for delaying decision-making in the futile and usually unnecessary quest for perfect information. Meetings filling this need are frequently called for no real, apparent purpose, but just from a manager’s general sense of unease about not having all the facts or perspectives that might be available.

Moreover, the wastefulness of such events usually isn’t restricted to their specific occurrence. When one like this is called, it tends to generate a cascading series of pre-meetings that flood the entire unit or organization. Conference rooms are overbooked as people schedule meetings the purpose of which is to prepare for other meetings, which may, themselves, be designed to prepare for still others.

And preceding all of this is an agenda item that finds its way onto almost every individual’s calendar: “prep for mtg.” Computers hum away as people search their files, scour the internet, and email each other about the upcoming meeting. They may even conduct their own real or virtual informal meetings to help each other prepare for their individual participation in the formal ones, or even to try to figure out what they are really about.

Of course, what often isn’t humming is the organization’s actual work, as its managers allow themselves to be sidetracked overlong onto secondary lines of what are essentially maintenance activity, drawing their juniors and their staff with them. These are all the more pointless as that maintenance activity becomes increasingly irrelevant in the absence of focused execution of primary operations.

The question of when to redirect the energies of your staff from preparing to doing is a classic dilemma, and meetings have long been misused to exacerbate it. This, however, has taken on a peculiar salience in the face of modern technology, offering its elusive promise of complete information and perfect coordination.

Several months ago Jared Sandberg did his WSJ Cubicle Culture column on the sometimes drastic measures people take to avoid such pointless meeting proliferation. His target is the ease with which corporate intranet scheduling technologies encourage this problem, but it’s well worth a read in the general context of today’s and tomorrow’s topics.

The use of meetings to inform the decision-making process can be helpful, even especially effective. But its potential for misuse must be addressed forthrightly and with discipline. Otherwise, it will breed organizational anxiety and cynicism, draining the focused energy needed for execution of the eventual decision.

Let’s meet back tomorrow about this - put it on your calendar. See you then!

—

Be sure not to miss any of the posts in this series!

1. Collaboration jams
2. The swaying sword of Damocles
3. Smoke-filled rooms
4. Meetings - what are they all about?
5. How about we get together sometime?
6. Can we fit this in somewhere?
7. Making your meeting
8. Managing your meeting
9. Are you sure we were at the same meeting?

—

Today’s tip: Visit Charles H. Green’s Trust Matters site for a piece about Faking Customer Centricity. You can’t kid your customers for long, any more than you can your staff.

—

Have you used the newest feature on the site yet? If you double-click on any (non-hypertext-linked) word on the main page, a window provided by Answers.com will open providing definitions or encyclopedic material about that term, together with links to additional sources of information. Try it out - it’s interesting and fun.

And, of course, while you’re clicking around, don’t forget to click on your choice of an email or RSS-feed subscription to these pages - we’ll be proud to have you join us!

Similar Posts:

• Making your meeting
• The swaying sword of Damocles
• Are you sure we were at the same meeting?
• Can we fit this in somewhere?
• Communicating in the executive suite

Technorati Tags: Meetings, manager, worker, plan, coordinate, assess, decision-making, accountability, control, information, purpose, perspective, organization, Conference, agenda, work, execution, operations, technology, Jared Sandberg, WSJ, Charles H. Green