Guest Post: Nitin Grewal

Nitin is one of Chris' Summer 2010 Professional Speaking students. Here he writes about real-world meetings.

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Meetings- even today this word makes me to run for cover. My former manager loved having meetings. Numerous hours were taken away from my daily schedule of day-dreaming ritual. To make it worse, the meeting was followed by minutes of meeting and another meeting. In my small world of Narnia and Transformers, I believed you can either work or do meetings; there is no concept of union of work and meetings. In today’s world, meeting is an important part responsible for delivery of the right product and yet, according to a survey reported in Industry Week, two thousand managers claimed that about one-third of the time they spend in meetings is wasted. According to a UK study, 5.7 years of our careers are spent in meetings.

Meetings are supposed to be the most effective method of communication, bringing every participant on same page and minimizing the error due to misunderstanding of requirement and results. People meet to share ideas and problems, discuss and distribute responsibilities. The face-to-face interaction helps them bond and create commitment, end product being “Action”. But do all meetings survive these criteria? A quote by John Kenneth Galbraith, “Meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything,” gave a push to my mind to analyze it. Today there are numerous channels for real-time communications. Video conferences and teleconference at least save the commute time. So is it better to get into virtual-world meetings?

So what separates a successful meeting from the ineffective one? Let me try and jolt down what I learned from my experiences and the last class lecture. First and foremost, we should ask ourselves, “Does the meeting really need to occur?” If it’s a status or review meeting, I would say think again. If it’s necessary, prepare it well. Set out the agenda, the list of must-attend “unfortunate” colleagues stating the meeting roles clearly and desirable outcomes of the meeting. Setting up the time and place best suitable for all the attendees would be the next hurdle. Inform all the attendees with the agenda, time and place of meeting. Roger Burns, a 30-year veteran of high-level meetings describes it like this, "Often times the first 20 or 30 minutes of our meetings would be spent with people flipping through the documents I had sent them over a week ago. They had not prepared and had no idea what questions I was going to talk in the next few minutes." So in order to save time, provide each participant the required information before hand. If you are acting as the chair of meeting, arrive early and be prepared to start the meeting on time, always value your own time and also that of others. Laying out the objective and setting the meeting’s tone is one of the leader’s key responsibilities. Stick to the agenda and invoke participation and discussion. I believe that’s what we are here for. At the end of the meeting, summarize all the points and come up with a decision and end the meeting on time. “No result” meetings are a pure waste of the company’s money.

I agree that meetings are necessary evils, but let’s make them short and effective. Sometimes meetings are going to be a waste of time, but sometimes they are productive as well. It’s up to us how we conduct or attend the meetings.