Organizational Waste of Time?
Meetings in organizations seem to be as certain as taxes and death. Regardless if the group is three or twenty, there will be one person in charge of the meeting and the rest will listen with an occasional comment. Meetings are a non-productive attempt to be productive.In a recent issue of USA Today, the results of a survey were shared about employees’ attitudes about meetings. Three out of four believed that meetings could be more effective. Over half (53%) spend up to 8 hours per week in meetings. And, 64 percent believe meetings are ineffective because there is a lack of preparation and/or participation.
What makes meetings so non-productive and sometimes outright painful? Mostly, meetings tend to feed the ego of those in charge. Also, there is a lack of preparation from the person in charge of the meeting. This leads to “herding” the group through an agenda, using “management-speak” to deflect questions that require detail or follow-up.
To the chairperson’s defense, it is tough to represent upper management when too much is cloaked in secrecy. It is also tough to be expected to have all the answers. There is a strong need for empathy from both sides of the meeting room table.
Is there an alternative to these time wasters? Yes and there are several layers to the answer. First, management should not use meetings to “keep in touch with employees.” Mangers should regularly visit with employees to get feedback about customer issues, production problems or suggestions that may lead to improvements. Residing in the office all day or only hanging out with other managers is a form of managerial incompetence. So, first and foremost, interact with all employees and know the “who, what, where, when and how.”
Second, I suggest reading the books of Edward de Bono. His most notable book is titled The Six Thinking Hats and can be read and understood in less than two hours. The book provides sufficient guidance to conducting productive meetings.
The main point of de Bono’s book is that “confusion is the enemy of good thinking.” To defeat confusion, you use his technique of “Parallel Thinking.” This is where the six hats strategy is employed. Each hat represents an area of thinking, for example emotional (red hat) or factual (white hat). Instead of the usual “free-for-all” discussion that can happen in meetings, each hat is employed separately to focus the problem with everyone participating under the same color hat. This is parallel thinking: everyone is focused and participating at the same time with the same goal.
For example, if the group is in fact finding, everyone is focused on what they know about the problem. Any distractive thoughts like “we tried this before and it didn’t work” is reserved for the time when cautious pessimism (black hat) is addressed.
The chairperson is now responsible for keeping the group focused on the problem and recording what is being discussed. The chairperson may assign additional work to be completed outside of the meeting and reported at the next gathering. Meetings become more productive if only because the group members now have a specific task and must report their findings at the next meeting.
For those people who may argue that these kinds of meetings take longer to conduct, they are wrong. For the most part, people are only asked to think or brainstorm for less than a minute. This is part of the strategy. If people have a sense of urgency and a short time frame, they are more likely to respond and contribute.
Even if the group plans to address all six separate areas of thinking, the meeting should be over in less than 15 minutes. The individual thinking may go on for another week, but not together as a formal group. Results are shared at the next meeting and the next phase of the problem solving initiative is planned.
Meetings don’t have to be unproductive or dreaded. People need their roles defined and the chairperson needs to understand what needs to be accomplished. Read de Bono’s book and visualize how it can be different.
Here’s an FYI: The great baseball player Satchel Paige made this outstanding observation: “Ain’t no man can avoid being born average, but there ain’t no man got to be common.”
