Another meeting

MANAGEMENT

Why have a meeting? What is its purpose? To decide, check your diary of the last eleven months. How many good hours of your life, have you spent in those claustrophobic, both in content and environment, the domineering conference room. Were those meetings needed? Did they impact meaningfully upon you or the organisation? Think. Ponder. Review. Having done so with a dispassionate attitude, next year or going forward for the remaining part of this year, too, don’t have those meetings which yielded no good.

Not all meetings are a waste. These can be good if they produce both tangible and intangible results. Tangible are measurable results. Intangibles are in the realm of non measurable like, camaraderie, team work, empathetic attitude development etc. Some meetings may not give immediate results but they foretell performance. Some meetings are not for results but for ratifying past decisions of the few by the many.

The purpose of the meeting should be known to participants, before hand. However sometimes for need of necessary ‘corporate suspense’ it can be kept hidden until arrival at the conference room. The agenda is important; it should be sharpened as per priority. Members of the committee must send their ‘ideas’ or ‘areas of interest’ and ‘matters of attention’ to the secretary of the committee. The chairman along with the secretary should then decide depending on the priority to include or exclude an item for tabling at the meeting. The chairman then guides the meeting to ensure that every agenda item is not only taken up for discussion but is also timed.

No meeting should be the privilege of the chairman to indulge in monologue mode. Participation by all present must be encouraged. To participate there has to be some meat in the comment. Preparation is the key to be a notable participant. In this endeavour, effort should be directed towards dominating feelings, emotions, reactions (especially knee-jerk) and the comment must be housed in the casket of maturity and calmness.

Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools talk because they have to say something. If a thought requires a long speech, give it a thought again, it is rightly said, speak less, err less.

The chairperson at all times during the course of the meeting, will remain mindful of the ‘show-offs’ and ‘the irrelevant’. Some participants in my experience attend meetings with the belief that they will unleash verbal power and feel victorious and pretend as if they have come to celebrate the capture of a not dead but a live Adolf Hitler! The detractors to the agenda must be kept on the leash. Comments after dinner types are not to be taken as good counsel.

No conference produces great ideas but a great many foolish ideas do perish there… and that’s an advantage of meetings, because the majority in the corporation is literally saved from having to bear with both foolery and idiotism of the ideas and their proponents. Greed makes you talk; contentment keeps you silent. As chairperson allow others to speak while choosing not to speak much. Hear every soul in the room. If you learn to listen you will still profit. It is the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen (Oliver Holmes). I have witnessed in many meetings and conferences that participants instead of listening remain more engaged on either preparing a question mentally the answer to which normally they have or they are rehearsing an answer to a question they think might be thrown at them. Said anonymously, the beginning of wisdom is silence. The second step is listening.

In the beginning the chairperson should give an overview on the need and purpose of the meeting without singling out any agenda item. This must be sponged with some inspirational and motivational remarks. To make meetings productive and of consequence it is best to start with ‘matter arising’ (from past meeting). If there is no follow up to a decision taken, assuredly no action would even take place. Meetings are taken seriously only when there is consistent follow up to action required.

All meetings must be planned. Start on time. End on time. No meeting should go beyond ninety minutes. The longer it is, the less impactful. The mind refuses to concentrate beyond its inherent span of attention. (talking of which some, of our renowned politicians lengthiest time span is measured in nano seconds!). Short and frequent meetings are far superior in producing results then long and few. Always plan the proceeding of the meetings. If it is on defined dates or days it helps remaining coordinated with all other set of responsibilities especially timings. The need of a certain degree of rigidity on timings can actually be extremely beneficial- it saves the meeting from journeying between sublime to the ridiculous.

Since meetings are likely to expand to fill the preallocated timings the chairperson must learn to conclude earlier. And in that there is no shame. In fact, shows respect and value for time. Never hesitate to close meeting earlier than schedule.

In the concluding part of the meeting spell out clearly the decisions taken and the time lines associated with its achievement, conclusion or delivery. The chairperson can ask while bringing the meeting to its end for an impromptu or through enshrined process, a feedback on the meeting to assess if the meeting achieved the purpose for which it was summoned. Not a bad idea for each participant to score on a rating scale of zero to ten representing failure and success, respectively. The fence sitting rating scale of 5 or 6 should be discouraged and admonished. Fence sitting is an act of crime in my personal estimation. And those who want to judge which way the wind shall blow should be thrown and blown out of the meetings. At best they are a nuisance and that too a very bad one, indeed. Not all meetings are bad. Some are good.

The writer is a freelance columnist