I’ve come to the conclusion that meetings are good.   And we need more of them – not less.

Most executives have a knee-jerk reaction against meetings; they are a waste of time.   Employees couldn’t agree more; let us get work done.

And yet if you are a manager, a major portion of your job is dedicated to communication… your time is  spent either in meetings or preparing for meetings.   Most meetings are a mashed-up bag of confusion that leaves people with the mistaken impression that meetings are the problem.  They aren’t.  It is the way we have meetings that is a problem.  The failure of meetings is an indictment of process and leadership… not of the concept.

A well organized meeting  in which people are prepared, the process has structure and the desired outcomes are clear (we need to decide X) is second to none in terms of efficiency.   Our businesses are the sum product of decision-making; “this is our business”, “this is our customer”, “this is how we reach them”, “this is how we measure value creation” and so on.   These decisions are constantly being reassessed and are rarely made alone, they are made in meetings.

I cannot count the number of times in which I have realized after the fact (why do you think I am writing this today?) that a two-week back and forth over email could have been resolved in an hour during a structured meeting.  Just as often I am aware that (as a consultant) I have tried to go extremely light on the meetings due the fact that my client(s) hate meetings.

Finally, despite my full embrace of social technologies, we still do not have a surrogate for face to face contact.  It  contains a density of actionable information that can’t be rivaled.  In that regard the most successful technology yet developed for collaboration is the table and chair.

Flickr image: mnadi