Meeting Frustration Factors
I participate in a lot of meetings. I enjoy good meetings when the group is charged, working well together and making progress. Even if the topic is not comfortable, if we’re still solving problems or coming to resolution and understanding, it’s a good meeting.
Conversely, I’ve been in meetings that frustrate me completely. Meetings where very little is accomplished and there is a sense of frustration and futility all around. Toxic personalities aside, I’ve discovered that these bad meetings are usually the result of two things:
1) An improper mix of big-picture personalities and detail-task personalities.
2) Lack of an appropriate, focused agenda.
Imagine you are meeting to develop a communications plan that will employ print, web and kiosk delivery methods. You need a high level plan to disseminate team and event information to a large, dispersed group. But one person on the team wants to focus on whether there should be a dash or a hyphen in one of the calendar entries. I’m not making this up. You're solving world hunger, they’re wanting to correct a typo on a nutritional label.
In all fairness, the spelling-checker personality is just as frustrated at this meeting as is the big-picture personality.
I have two suggestions. First, deploy people appropriately: Solve big-picture issues with big-picture people; solve task issues with detail-task people. Of course you will need to blend the personalities so the big-picture types don’t go off on impossible-to-achieve tangents and the detail-task folks don’t bog down in hyphen-dash debates. Both perspectives are required, just not at the same time. Thus, the right blend is a must.
Second, set your agendas accordingly. If you're after a high level plan, have a Big-Picture meeting. Communicate the objectives clearly and keep the meeting on track. Be clear that you want to hear about details only to the degree that a given idea or proposal is not impossible or unworkable. Save working out the details for the Working-Out-The-Details meeting with other detail-task members.
As with the Big-Picture meeting, keep the Working-Out-The-Details meeting flowing with a specific agenda and enough Big-Picture people involved to keep it from bogging down. The mantra at this meeting should be, “we’re looking for excellence, not unattainable perfection”.
I've found that this approach is effective when there is a fairly sizable endeavor, the opportunity is strategic or the threat is somewhat ambiguous.
Feel free to add comments with things you find make meetings more productive.
Conversely, I’ve been in meetings that frustrate me completely. Meetings where very little is accomplished and there is a sense of frustration and futility all around. Toxic personalities aside, I’ve discovered that these bad meetings are usually the result of two things:
1) An improper mix of big-picture personalities and detail-task personalities.
2) Lack of an appropriate, focused agenda.
Imagine you are meeting to develop a communications plan that will employ print, web and kiosk delivery methods. You need a high level plan to disseminate team and event information to a large, dispersed group. But one person on the team wants to focus on whether there should be a dash or a hyphen in one of the calendar entries. I’m not making this up. You're solving world hunger, they’re wanting to correct a typo on a nutritional label.
In all fairness, the spelling-checker personality is just as frustrated at this meeting as is the big-picture personality.
I have two suggestions. First, deploy people appropriately: Solve big-picture issues with big-picture people; solve task issues with detail-task people. Of course you will need to blend the personalities so the big-picture types don’t go off on impossible-to-achieve tangents and the detail-task folks don’t bog down in hyphen-dash debates. Both perspectives are required, just not at the same time. Thus, the right blend is a must.
Second, set your agendas accordingly. If you're after a high level plan, have a Big-Picture meeting. Communicate the objectives clearly and keep the meeting on track. Be clear that you want to hear about details only to the degree that a given idea or proposal is not impossible or unworkable. Save working out the details for the Working-Out-The-Details meeting with other detail-task members.
As with the Big-Picture meeting, keep the Working-Out-The-Details meeting flowing with a specific agenda and enough Big-Picture people involved to keep it from bogging down. The mantra at this meeting should be, “we’re looking for excellence, not unattainable perfection”.
I've found that this approach is effective when there is a fairly sizable endeavor, the opportunity is strategic or the threat is somewhat ambiguous.
Feel free to add comments with things you find make meetings more productive.
posted by Eric Haglund at
8:06 AM
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