Our Roles in Meetings
A majority of meetings we sit through are draining and the sharp increase in virtual meetings has only exacerbated those sentiments.
To shift this experience, we can start by owning three roles in meetings: 1) assist with establishing why a meeting is necessary and 2) create space for a ‘good fight’, and 3) role model engagement.
One of the tension points with meetings is that they often meander and lose their way. Meetings can often feel like items that could have been conveyed via email read aloud, resulting in lost productivity time. In Mastering Online Meetings, Fraidenburg (2020) plainly states that an agenda for a meeting should be structured as a “work plan to create a deliverable by the end of the meeting”, not a “list of topics to be discussed at a meeting”.
In this month’s book read, Great at Work, Hansen (2018) outlines a good fight and engagement. To have a ‘good fight’ in meetings, “team members debate the issues, consider alternatives, challenge one another, listen to [all] views, scrutinize assumptions, and enable every participant to speak up without fear or retribution.” To role model engagement in meetings, we should, “show up to every meeting 100% prepared, craft an opinion and deliver it with conviction (and data), let the best argument win, even if it isn’t yours (and often it isn’t),” and commit/implement the decision made “without second-guessing or undermining it.”
So, leaders...are you willing to accept these three roles in meetings? Will you assist in keeping the meeting on task, working toward deliverables? Will you contribute to creating safe spaces for constructive conflict and healthy ‘fights’? Can the team look to you as the model for engagement? Consider the shifts in engagement, productivity, and relationships if all meetings embodied these elements. Until then, make sure your meetings do!
Quote for Growth
“We don’t need teams to conduct a vast number of meetings to get their work done. Rather, we need smarter team meetings where people debate rigorously and commit to decisions.”
Video of the Week