Guest Post: Aravind Bharadwaj

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

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Today’s workplace demands more collaboration than ever before. All decisions are consensus-driven and teamwork is extremely essential. As per a survey by Gartner, meetings take up over 20% of the average employee’s work day. Although so much man power is channeled to meetings, usually very little is derived from it.

Very few of the meetings I have had to attend had an agenda, and almost none of the meetings stuck to the proposed agenda. I can recollect a meeting from my early days at work. My manager had set up a 1-hour slot and invited several operations analysts and senior managers. There was no agenda or any specific context to the meeting. I was a silent observer once the meeting began. Very quickly I began to realize that different attendees were talking about completely different things. The meeting went on for an hour and ended abruptly. Quite a few things went wrong with the meeting. The lack of agenda paved the way for an open-ended discussion on almost any topic. No one was moderating the meeting and there were several parallel threads. There did not seem to be a common shared purpose or understanding. Most importantly, there was no tangible outcome after the meeting.

In retrospect, there are several things I could have done to fix the meeting (or several other similar meetings). Agenda should be the center of every meeting with the moderator ensuring that all items on the agenda are covered and that the meeting does not deviate from the agenda. It is also important that people discuss issues in a logical sequence allowing opinions and discussions in the mean time. Further, it is critical that all participants in the meeting understand the context of the meeting and the items being discussed. It is the moderator’s responsibility to bring others up to speed before the meeting by sending documents and other supplementary material.

Professor Labash mentions four key personality types as it relates to meetings - thrust, drag, lift and gravity. I realize that it is important to have people who thrust and lift in a meeting than people with drag and gravity attributes. Meetings should be headed towards action. Meetings which don’t result in actionable results are a waste of the accumulated manpower engaged in it.