by John J. Walters
The past two weeks I’ve talked about how meetings generally suck, and that most people who are there would rather be anywhere else. A quick search of the web will show that there are indeed other people who think meetings suck — and are talking about it!
One of them is Sue Pelletier, whose list of her top ten reasons to bolt from a meeting was the focus of last week’s post. This week’s seed article is a very well written piece by Craig Borysowich about the importance of keeping your eyes on the prize when it comes to meetings.
It’s no secret that one of the keys to a good meeting is having an agenda so everyone starts off at the same point and on the right foot. The quality of feedback will vary greatly between a meeting where everyone sits down prepared and one where nobody knows what the topic is until they see the first power point slide.
Can you imagine asking a teacher to waltz into a classroom and teach a class on a topic of your choice without any preparation whatsoever? They might be able to pull it off if all the conditions are right. Perhaps they have a good grasp of the chosen subject, or maybe they’ve been to a particularly informative seminar on a similar topic. But the odds that they’ll stumble around and generally confuse the students are much greater the less preparation you allow them.
Holding a meeting without an agenda, or even with a brief or vague agenda, is kind of like that, except there are multiple teachers in the room. Everyone is expected to both inform and be informed; participation is mandatory. There are often large costs (in terms of lost productivity) associated with everyone leaving the meeting and going off on their own to relearn everything they were supposed to learn during the meeting, if this is even possible.
Yes, the stakes are high, but luckily one of the best ways to mitigate the risk that everyone will leave the room saying, “Well that was a complete waste of my life,†is also quite simple.
When planning a meeting, write down everything you want to get accomplished. Send this list out to all attendees and ask for their input. Revise this into a solid agenda for the meeting and send it out a few days prior so everyone can show up prepared.  If you can’t do all this, then maybe it’s time to rethink why you’re scheduling the meeting in the first place.
In a nutshell: plan meetings with the agenda right from the start. Get input, listen to it, and start the process early enough so there are no surprises.
I know this sounds like it may take a bit more time and preparation than your standard meetings, but maybe that’s why standard meetings tend to suck so much.
Hmm, I like it, but maybe a better analogy is a class where the teacher knows what the lesson is on, but it’s not grounded in any context that the students find meaningful or relevant.
At least in my class, I want the students to both inform and be informed during class, so they need to know what we’ll be discussing ahead of time, so they can take ownership to read and prepare on their own.
If they don’t know what I’m teaching the next day, or at least a general sense of the direction the class will take, they’re way more apt to just sit there blankly, or fall asleep, or talk about sports, or make their to-do list in the margin of their binder, just like I do in meetings where I don’t know the agenda ahead of time.
This is a good point.
Often the teacher’s solution to this is “syllabus week” — that famous first week of classes when all you do is go over syllabus after syllabus in all your classes, then promptly forget what little you actually listened to.
I guess the trick is for the teacher, or meeting leader, to be prepared and to find an engaging and meaningful way for all the participants to prepare as well.