What is the Point of Meetings?
What is the point of this meeting?
That's a question we all find ourselves asking at least every once in a while, if not much more frequently.
It's the right question, I just don't think we are sincere and discerning enough when we silently ask it to ourselves.
I've seen organizations that have weekly team meetings just for the sake of having them. At some point, it was understood that teams should meet regularly because that is what teams do. So teams continue to do just that without any real intention behind them. They become a check-the-box activity.
This is a large part of why meetings have become the target of criticism and frustration.
But the audience, those of us who are receiving these meeting invites, are just as guilty of creating this phenomenon. We have stopped assessing invites based on their purpose or the value they add. Most of us automatically accept meeting invites as we receive them without performing any such assessment.
I've previously covered tips for assessing and accepting meetings. Today I am going to shift the focus to answer the question I started with. What is the point of meetings? Understanding what you are trying to achieve in any given meeting will help you plan and facilitate it more effectively. It will also allow you to discern if and when a meeting might not be the best option.
For any meeting that we are organizing, we should be asking ourselves: what will change as a result of this meeting? If the answer is not compelling, we should be thinking about alternative formats.
Being intentional about your meetings doesn’t just make them more effective, but it also helps set a tone for how your directs should be thinking about the purpose of their meetings.
Below are the most common purposes or benefits of team meetings. Typically, a number of these components will be represented in a single meeting but it's a great way to start assessing how intentionally you are leveraging the meeting format.
Information Sharing
This is the most common one and also the one I'm least in favor of. So many recurring team meetings are essentially status updates from different attendees. Engagement tends to be low as people are just waiting for their turn to speak and are only half-listening during other's turns. This is especially true if the meeting is virtual, at which point they are likely sorting through their inbox.
Information sharing is also a really obvious opportunity to leverage alternative communication methods. It's a workplace meme at this point to say "this meeting could have been an email" and that's a great question to ask before you schedule it. Could I achieve essentially the same result by communicating this digitally as opposed to holding a meeting?
On the other hand, some information sharing should absolutely happen in a meeting. For instance, if you need to communicate difficult news that will affect the team, that's best done in a meeting and not via email.
Ultimately, you need to exercise your judgment on when to include information sharing as part of a meeting but an easy place to start is to reserve general status updates to other channels.
Presenting
Presenting is another form of information sharing but with enough distinction to cover it separately. When I say presenting, I mean doing so with the intent of adding personal value to the entire audience. Things like trainings and not-too-frequent town hall meetings are great examples. In these formats, a large majority of your audience should be walking away with information that will help them be more effective in their roles.
Adding personal value is the distinction to be made here. I've been a part of leadership teams where each attendee has created slides to "present" their department's status updates. That's still information sharing, just on a more elaborate and expensive scale. The reason it's still information sharing is that the other attendees received minimal personal benefit to hearing the rest of the team's status updates. Whatever benefit they did obtain could have been achieved through other communication channels.
Brainstorming
Meetings are great for brainstorming and problem solving because they allow the team to build off one another's ideas in a way that's difficult to recreate in asynchronous channels.
Brainstorming is also a wonderful cure to the "status update" problem. Instead of having each individual provide general updates, have them share a particular challenge they are up against, an innovative win or some mix between the two. This type of exercise creates an opportunity to share and build upon ideas with one another. This will create more engagement and lasting value than routine status check-ins.
Just be careful that brainstorming isn't left so open-ended that nothing changes. Remember our guiding question of "what will be different as a result of this meeting?". Brainstorming is a great form of collaboration during a meeting, but it needs to lead to something. That leads us to our next component…
Decision Making
Following the theme of meetings affecting change, large decision points are a great use of a meeting. Sure, these decisions can be made through digital communications, but large or complex decisions often come with clarifying questions by the decision maker and live conversations are more conducive to those conversations than back and forth emails.
Decision making also comes in the form of role clarity. Clearly stating who is responsible for which action items coming out of the meeting. This is a good compliment to the brainstorming exercise. At the end of such an exercise, you'll have decisions to make. What, if any, work should be prioritized from this? For the items that are prioritized, who is responsible for them and when should they be due?
Building Relationships
You don't need awkward team building exercises to build relationships during meetings. When done right, meetings present a broad range of opportunities to naturally strengthen relationships.
This happens through personal exchanges, non-verbal cues, clarification of roles, discussion of shared goals and more. All of these things help members of a team understand one another just a little bit better which ultimately builds trust.
I don't recommend holding regular meetings solely for the purpose of building relationships; however, I do encourage leaders and their teams to be intentional about relationship building in all interactions and that very much includes team meetings.
This Week's Action Items:
For any meeting you're planning, ask yourself "what will change as a result of this meeting?"
Consider which of the components above can be used in combination to deliver the most value.
For items that deliver little personal or team value, consider alternative delivery methods.
