Why Meetings?
Understand the functions meetings perform and use this knowledge to improve your meetings.
Most people hate meetings or at least consider them a bad utilization of time. It’s true that many meetings are inefficient and ineffective. But meetings aren’t inherently bad — they’re just not done right most of the time. If done right, meetings perform certain functions better than any other form of communication!
This article is inspired by Harvard Business Review’s “How to run a meeting” and highlights the communication functions for which meetings shine. It is the basis to understand the purpose of meetings and why it pays to improve how we conduct them.
What can meetings do best
Define the team
One obvious function of a meeting is to define them team. Those who participate, belong to the team, while those who are left out, don’t belong to the team. It’s simple and might sound silly — but it’s important. A team united through meetings feels a collective identity.
Keeping the team defining function in mind can help when planning and optimizing meetings. Sometimes you have to leave people out to keep a meeting small and efficient. Be aware of the message you send them and counter the feeling of being outside the collective identity e.g. by making the practical reasons clear. On the other hand, you can use invitations and non-invitations to a meeting to strengthen the collective identity of a team.
Build shared knowledge
Creating a pool of shared knowledge is another important function of meetings. What the members of a team know individually alone does not define what the group knows. Collective experiences, judgements and rituals add to those of the individuals. A group is defined by what everyone of them knows. Enhancing and refreshing this pool of shared knowledge and experiences is important to defining a team.
Apart from knitting the team together, sharing knowledge and experiences in a group also leads to more creative ideas and better decisions. However, it is important to conduct the meeting well or else you might end up with worse ideas and decisions.
Understand collective goals
Meetings help a group to understand the collective goals and the role they play in achieving them. It is one of the most challenging aspects of leadership to have everyone understand the collective objectives of a project. Meetings greatly support a common understanding of goals. They also help clarify different versions of these goals in different heads. But probably the most important aspect is to show each individual, where their work fits into the collective goals of the group.
Carry decisions as a group
Being present in a meeting makes you committed to the decisions made in that meeting. Even if you originally opposed a decision, you will carry it with the group after you had the chance to discuss and decide it among the team.
Also decisions of a group carry more gravitas than decisions of an individual. A group decisions already carries objections of different minds in it and thus is perceived as more authoritative than a decision of an individual.
Work as a group
For some people, meeting is actually the only time they can really work as a group. This is especially true in the world of high-ranking executives. Also it is one of the rare opportunities for a leader to really play the role of leader, instead of just being the person on top, whom everyone reports to.
Find your status
It might sound archaic, but as social animals we still try to find our status in the group constantly. A meeting gives us the room to see our relative standing. It is important to keep this function of the meeting in mind, especially when people from different departments meet. Acknowledge that everyone will try to find and define their relative standing and prepare for it. Denying this human tendency might make you blind for certain aspects and could end up making your meeting less effective.
Final words
All these various functions of a meeting don’t occur in isolation, but are usually more or less strong aspects of a single meeting or even a single agenda item. To be aware of these functions is key to successful meetings. Be prepared for them to happen and use them to your advantage!
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About me
I am on a mission to tap into the unexploited brain power of humans! I coach and advice teams in methods to increase individual and team productivity. You can hire me through my company Dreimannzelt. I help with agile methods like Scrum, design thinking, lean startup techniques as well as cultural and organizational changes. I write on Medium to make people more productive and show them how much fun it can be.
