Guest Post: Tarjani Oza

This is Tarjani's second guest post on the blog. Here she writes about real-world meetings.

“..Those who live in the world of human reality know that it is held together by face-to-face meetings!”, says Anthony Jay, the author of the Harvard Business Review on “How to run a meeting”. A strong statement in itself, but true nonetheless. Meetings are a very important element of the social fabric of the human society. The effect of communication between live persons talking face to face is much deeper and personal than memos, emails or teleconferenced meetings. This is the reason that if a person works in an isolated setting, the need for human contact makes him “meet” with people outside work socially or recreationally.
The meetings in the corporate world, however, are not always seen in this positive light. Often they are deemed to be unnecessarily and unproductive. Professor Labash gave us an interesting statistic in class last week: that a corporate professional spends about 5 years of his/her entire life in meetings - 5 years! That is a lot. No wonder I have seen many a technical person cringe at the sound of the word 'meeting'. But imagine an office culture devoid of meetings. Communication would be chaotic and probably inconsistent.

The key here, I think, is not to get rid of meetings, but to make them effective and efficient. The idea should be to synthesize the thoughts of different people in order to increase the collective value of the team. To ensure this, the first step should be to find out if the meeting is needed at all. The information that can be delivered by offline methods, if delivered by a meeting, causes a feeling of wastage of time and loss of productivity. The next step to ensure that a meeting works is to have a definite purpose and agenda for the meeting. Agenda is the central element of any meeting as it is the road map that determines its course. Unfortunately many meetings fail to add productive value because they lose focus on the agenda at hand.

The role of the meeting coordinator here comes to light. The meeting coordinator is the person who leads the meeting and steers its direction until completion. He is not the one with the entire responsibility of the discussion, but it is his job to drive back to course if the team is drifting during a meeting. A good meeting coordinator ensures that the time and agenda of a meeting are respected by each team member including the coordinator himself. It is also his job to ensure equal participation. We should understand that meetings are a way to collaborate, to share and discuss ideas and to generate new ways of solving problems. If the invitees are wisely chosen, then each person has a unique perspective to the issue at hand and is expected to add unique value to the discussion. Thus the coordinator should ensure that everyone gets to state their opinions without thrusting his own opinion too early in the meeting.

Professor Labash summarized the 5 P’s of a great meeting:
1. Purpose – A clearly defined purpose for which a particular set of people have gathered. This and only this should be the central focus of the meeting.
2. People – The people invited should add value and expertise and provide new perspectives to existing issues.
3. Preparation – Each member should be adequately prepared for the success of a meeting. A meeting where work is done during the meeting wastes time for a lot of people.
4. Participation – Participation is of greatest importance because if one or two people do all the talking, then valuable opinions from other skilled members are lost and the results obtained are not deep and effective.
5. Point – If the team stays on agenda and the coordinator drives the meeting successfully, then it should result in action. As Professor Labash said, “A meeting without action is not a meeting, but a conversation.” The goal of every meeting should be to produce some action, some decisions that help progress the team from where they were before the meeting.

If a good coordinator leads a focused, prepared and disciplined team, then the meeting can be very productive. Anthony Jay calls this concept “social mind,” where the collective mental acumen of a bunch of skilled people is greater than the sum of each one taken individually.

I have had some good meetings and bad meetings in my career of four years in the IT industry, in which most of them were teleconferences or over-the-phone meetings. But the effectiveness of person-to-person meetings is much stronger in my experience and leads to far better results in the real world.