Organizations of every size have meetings. Meetings are necessary to bring people together and create a shared perspective. Without meetings, people are left to make decisions in isolation, lacking input from other areas of the company. Since an individual rarely has a comprehensive view of a situation, it’s not typically optimal for just one person to run the show.
The unfortunate reality, though, is that meetings are often something organizations manage very poorly or fail to manage altogether. At best, the efficacy of a meeting is left to the skills of the meeting’s organizer. The result is that, unless the person leading the meeting is highly skilled, people find meetings to be ineffective and inconsistent in achieving the needed outcomes.
In other words, while meetings may be necessary, they can also be highly unpopular. They have a reputation for wasting time, destroying morale, and worse. Yet, bringing together a thoughtfully selected group of people for a specific purpose is arguably one of the most fundamental ways to get things done in an organization.
The solution to this dilemma is to add structure to meetings. Meeting Structure is how organizations ensure the consistency and effectiveness of different types of meetings to achieve the desired outcomes.
This definition of Meeting Structure highlights that there are a variety of meetings; therefore, different structures are needed to achieve a particular meeting’s desired outcomes—be that to solve a problem, deliver a sales presentation, or give a progress update on a project.
Organize Meetings by Type
We all want better meetings and there is an abundance of advice about how to improve them. Oftentimes, the common wisdom you’ll hear regarding best practices for meetings includes suggestions like starting and stopping on time, sharing the agenda before the meeting, assigning a note taker, and closing with task assignments.
This isn’t bad advice, but it is an overly simplistic “one-size-fits-all” approach. The flaw with this thinking is that it disregards a fundamental fact about the nature of meetings: they aren’t all the same. Meetings come in different types. A one-to-one meeting is different from a town hall, which is different from a sales demonstration meeting. For meeting structures to be effective, they must be appropriate for the meeting type.
For that reason, the first step to improving meetings is to define and acknowledge the key types of meetings that exist (or should exist) in your organization. Then it’s safe to move ahead with establishing rules and best practices. Otherwise, the end result is a simplistic list of guidelines that aren’t effective for the majority of a company’s meetings.
Productive meetings are grounded in this principle: you must first organize meetings by type, then you can develop the right meeting structure for each type. Meetings can’t be dependent on the person who is leading them to make them productive; they require enduring structures that can withstand changes in personnel. That is why Meeting Structure begins with understanding the variety of meetings your organization has, not with trying to conform all meetings to a single set of rules.
The concepts from this article were taken from Meeting Structure: Achieving meeting effectiveness through structure. Available through The ReWild Group and Amazon, the book explores in-depth this and other concepts while providing illustrations to help business leaders incorporate the ideas into their organizations. Get your copy today to start benefiting from Meeting Structure in your company.