Meetings often bother me. They are important an dcan be useful. But they also often seem to be largely a waste of time. I sit there day-dreaming or tapping on my notebook (very rude!!) waiting for something that is of relevance to me.
I've been thinking about this on and off and would like to develop "theory of meetings", or atleast part of one.
The particular sorts of meetings that I want to consider are what might be called "business meetings". There are lots of other sorts of meetings that I'm not covering. These would include meetings for brain storming, meetings for teaching, meetings for pastoral care etc.
The key item in my understanding of a "business meeting" is implementing the reporting structure of a group, so I'll talk a little bit about reporting structure.
Any group that is working together towards a common goal needs to communicate. Where that group is a church group, a business, a research group, or a military unit, the basic communication needs are very similar.
For small groups (upto about 8) people can simply talk to each other. Beyond that, there are too many "Each others"s for this to work, and there needs to be a more structured approach to communicating.
I would suggest that the best struture for improving communication is a heirarchical reporting structure. In this structure there is a tree with formal information flow being both towards and away from the root. This allows information to flow from any node to any other node. However the greater the distance, the less detailed the information flow will be. This saves everybody from needing to be distracted by the details of work that is only distantly related to their work, but still allows everyone to have some idea of what is going on in the whole organisation.
In this structure, each node in the tree is (usually) an individual. They receive reports from the nodes below them and pass summaries up the the node above them. They also receive breifing from the node above them and provide briefings to the nodes below them.
In some cases, a node may be a "board" rather than an individual. The members of the board are the nodes immediately beneath the board. The present reports to the board, and by being on the board they receive briefings. This can certainly work for the root of the tree. I'm not sure how well it works for nodes lower down the tree. But I would not want to rule it out.
So, back to meetings. My main point is that meetings work well for briefing, but not so well for reporting.
In a briefing situation, a manager, or team leader, or facilitator, or senior officer gives information to their staff, or team members, or under-officers, or whatever. All of these people need to receive essentially the same information, so giving it in a meeting saves of time. Also, when someone has a question about information in the briefing, they can ask in the meeting, and everybody benefits from hereing the question and the answer.
On the other hand, reporting doesn't work so well in a meeting. This is partly because the leader (for want of a better word) has a deeper interest in the report than the other reporters. Thus if a meeting is held for a number of people to report to their "leader", then most people will find a lot of the content only partially valuable.
If, instead, the "leader" meets with each person who reports to them individually to receive a report, then that meeting will probably be much more efficient. The reporter will feel that they and their report are more valued and the content of the meeting will be more focussed. The "leader" may end up spending a bit more time in all the meetings, but this should not be necessary, and where it happens, it will probably correspond to greater value in the meetings.
The reporting structure and the briefing structure do not need to be exactly the same. It may well be appropriate for individuals to report to team leaders, for those team leaders to report to a group leader, and for that group leader to brief all of the individuals. The details of these structures will depend alot on local details of how closely groups and subgroups need to work together.
Comments...
(29 May 2006, 21:32 UTC) I too have been involved as both a leader of group meetings and an antendee. Having all members of a team report in at the meeting is a terrible waste of time, and the leader does not receive as much details as they need to be effective. The best use of a group meeting I have seen is for brainstorming sessions.
yes, agreed