We all love meetings!!! Meetings allow us to fill time in our calendars and we can spend some entire days just attending meetings. As the Amerrican economist John Kenneth Glbraith once said "MEETINGS are indispensable when you don't want to do anything". More close to our Indian context, Iremember watching a Jaspal Bhatti (comedian) TV serial episode (those were the days we just had two channels Door Darshan 1 and Door Darshan 2) in which the people working in a Government department have a meeting to decide on the agenda for the meeting with the department head (it had interesting decision items, like whether to order Samosa or Kachori etc.).Dont think that this is restricted to Government organizations. I was part of one of the IT organizations in which we spent a good amount of time planning the customer visits and their agenda items (this includes planning lunches and dinners as well). This was an entirely a new experience for me and I enjoyed it for a while. Peter Drucker says "MEETINGS are a symptom of bad organization. The fewer MEETINGS the better". I started realising this slowly as I learnt that attending meetings was not adding any value to my knowledge and skills. I started organizing myself carefully and started working on prioritising the meetings.
There are two real reasons for attending the meetings. Visibility and Impact to your team or organization. Even if we are attending the high visibility meeting, the impact we create is what makes the difference. If we are not able to make an impact, high visibility would automatically reduce to low visibility and low impact. On one side. it is important to categorize the meetings, but on the other, it is equally important to ensure that we get the intended results.
Like for all other items, here is my block on meetings. In case of meetings, I would like to use the combination of Visibility and Impact.
High Visibility and High Impact: This is a no brainer. We must attend meetings in this category and ensure that we make a difference. During the earlier part of my career, I used to be part of many meetings falling into this cateogory and I attended them all without a defined objective in adavance. Now I walk into such meetings with clear objectives and take aways. In my definition, high visibility meetings are meetings with people one level or above than yours either in your organization or across functions. Some of the examples of high visibility meetings are making presentations to senior leadership, attending workshops with a senior group, or even presenting a paper in a conference. These opporunties do not happen frequently and deriving the maximum benefit from such meetings benefits you and your team or function.
High Visibility and Low Impact: Some examples of these meetings are all- hands-meetings of the function, or generic meetings called by senior people or presentations made by senior people. These events may not have significant impact to your function or team, however these are opportunities to get noticed during early stages of your tenure in the organization. As Manager these are opportunities to groom your second line.
Low Visibiity and High Impact: An example of these meetings are technical discussions about a process which affects your team or function. This will have a signficant impact to the functioning of your team but having said that your time can be better invested. Identify the right person to attend the meeting from your team and coach the person to ensure that department objectives are not compromised. One of the best practices is to attend such meetings for the first time along with your team member and set the expectations right. Then onwards let your team member take the ownership. This again is a wonderful grooming opportunity and should be leveraged to the optimum.
Low Visibility and Low Impact: Some examples of such meetings are town hall meetings organized by the company, or generic meetings organized by other functions. These meetings are good for socializing and networking, but in terms of visibility and impact the returns are minimum. Attend these meetings only if you want to enjoy...
There is one exception, attend all meetings organized by your boss or delegated to you by your boss.
