Death by Meeting – Feels like we all go through this!!
January 24, 2008 1:30 PM
Filed Under: Sybase News
This is probably relevant not only to IT folks, but also to all those poor souls who feel like a good part of their life is getting wasted attending meetings.
My x-boss recently recommended me this book "Death by Meeting” by Patrick Lencioni. I wouldn't say, yet, that it has immensely helped me as I haven’t put the recommendations into use but I can say it has changed my perspective, in a positive way, on meetings. Patrick provides an excellent take on meetings and how they are approached today and instead of framing it like any other “Help the manager” book, he weaves a story and tries to bring out the essence of his ideas using the story as the backdrop. One thing it does is it makes it a more interesting read compared to many other books that I’ve bought and lie in my “To be Read” pile.
Two main points regarding meetings that comes out of the book.
a) Create conflict in meetings and don’t try to use meetings just to get a consensus. Without conflict, it makes the meetings very boring as there is no drama involved. But I think care has to be taken not to make it overly dramatic. I think he calls this positive conflict and uses an analogy with movies where most of the successful movies have conflict, tension that make the viewers engrossed and feel like they are involved.
b) He recommends using different kinds of meetings to accomplish different things. In our organization we tend to distinguish different kinds of meetings but there is no structure to how we distinguish them. One thing to keep in mind is that this structure author recommends may not be applicable to all organizations, especially one like ours where developers have schedules and projects that they are working on and daily checkin meetings won’t be as meaningful.
- Daily checkin – Quick five minute meeting with quick updates from all team members.
- Weekly catch up – Quick round up and then focus on few agenda items, established based on earlier roundup, that are of higher priority for rest of time left in the 1/1.5hr scheduled time
- Monthly strategic – These meetings are where pre defined agenda exists and topics are discussed in detail to determine strategic direction. These meetings need to have a lot of exchange of ideas and not just be a monotonous capture of each person’s thoughts.
- Quarterly offsite – This helps managers to step away from office and discuss strategy, personnel, competition etc.
Hopefully I can start applying the principles in my meetings and will update on how it worked….
Posted by Himagiri Mukkamala on January 24, 2008 1:30 PM
Comments
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Dilbert's response
Doug Smith email -
Himagiri ,
What you are talking about is a combination of
1. Avoiding Group Think
2. 5 minute manager
However, the only way to truly avoid group think is to ALLOW dissent. this is not possible in most settings, despite public proclaimations of inviting input.
I dont want to appear cynical, but I think that
Unless we operate in an atmosphere free from politics and "cuthroat survivor" mentality, CREATIVE input is often supresses, and in some cases, stomped on.
Trust is the precursor to the type of meeting you are talking about.
Great Blog entry, by the way!!
Doug Smith email -
Himagiri ,
What you are talking about is a combination of
1. Avoiding Group Think
2. 5 minute manager
However, the only way to truly avoid group think is to ALLOW dissent. this is not possible in most settings, despite public proclaimations of inviting input.
I dont want to appear cynical, but I think that
Unless we operate in an atmosphere free from politics and "cuthroat survivor" mentality, CREATIVE input is often supressed, and in some cases, stomped on.
Trust is the precursor to the type of meeting you are talking about.
Great Blog entry, by the way!!
