Meetings

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I’m conflicted about meetings.  Generally, I think of them as things people hold because they have nothing else with which to occupy their time.  I mean, who has time for a meeting when there is so much to do RIGHT NOW?

OK, so I’m being a bit facetious.  There are all kinds of meetings, many of which are scheduled to be held at regular intervals whether or not they’re needed.  I made it a habit to ask about the objectives of a particular meeting before I would go (maybe that’s why I stopped getting invited!).  I also could never understand why the person calling the meeting would often show up without an agenda of some sort.  The lack of a road-map often got meetings wandering in 100 directions with none of them ever leading to a productive end.

The most productive regular meeting in which I ever participated was not on anyone’s calendar but was held almost daily.  I was at ABC Sports and every morning, the senior staff would wind up in someone’s office, drinking coffee and discussing what was going on in the wide, wide world of sports and at ABC.  You never knew where the meeting was being held – you wandered around until you found it.  I think we might have held one formal staff meeting a quarter but everyone was totally up to speed on a daily basis.  Of course, it also helped that the staff genuinely liked one another and enjoyed hanging out together (but team building is a topic for another post!).

We live in an age of immediate communication.  It’s easy to rely on instant messaging and email to do that communicating but the reality is that there is no substitute for good, face to face interaction in an informal setting.  My rules were always go visit someone if you could, call them if you couldn’t, and send email as a last resort.  Formal meetings tend to make you lazy – “oh, I’ll see so and so in the 3pm meeting…” so you don’t go see them NOW and solve the problem or move the project forward.

I’m all for constant, personal communication.  But I really hate meetings!  They’re great ways to make a 5 minute chat into a 2 hour waste of time!