Jessica Pryce-Jones - Running Great Meetings and Workshops For Dummies

Running Great Meetings & Workshops For Dummies

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This edition first published 2014
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Chapter 1

In This Chapter

Reviewing why people hate meetings

Recognising when people get a lot from their workshops

Understanding meetings and workshops: similarities and differences

Everything important that youll ever do at work involves other people. Even if a large chunk of your working day is solitary, at some point, colleagues, contacts, critics or clients come into the equation. They check in with you or you with them because everyone wants to be clear about whos on track, who needs help, or whos made fantastic progress. But doing this one person at a time is inefficient.

So you have a meeting.

In most of our organisations and certainly those where interesting knowledge-work is being done, complexity is the order of the day. What we all do has become more specialised, more process-oriented and more project-driven. This means lots of complex problem-solving and continuous learning as everyone pulls together to meet deadlines, respond to changing environments and maximise both performance and productivity. You simply cannot do this one person at a time.

So you get together for a workshop.

When you leave a meeting or a workshop having done really great work in a group, youll feel buzzed and motivated. But the problem is that many meetings achieve just the opposite: Participants walk out deflated, de-energised and sometimes desperate. This chapter outlines the reasons for those negative feelings and then points you in the right direction for fixing them.

If you dont enjoy your meetings, youre part of a very large worldwide club. Many people feel the same as you. But heres the strange thing: Even when you hate your meetings, when you emerge feeling frustrated and furious, you still brace yourself and trudge off to attend the next one. Then you schedule yet more.

Too many of us are on meeting treadmills believing that poor meetings are a necessary evil of business life. We go to them because we feel we have to; we go to them to be seen. But we dont enjoy them because they suck. Theyre poorly planned, badly run and add zero value.

And we all sit quietly back colluding while colleagues make it much worse when they fail on the preparation front. The result is that because nothing much gets done, more and more participants behave badly, but no one ever puts it right.

So what needs changing?

To clarify what people dislike most about their meetings, we decided to run a small research project. We asked a class of 80 executive MBA students doing a part-time degree what their top reasons for disliking meetings were. Then we collated the most repeated themes and put them into a questionnaire.

We ran that questionnaire online and face-to-face in Kenya, Singapore, South Africa, The Netherlands and the UK. In the end, we had 675 answers from 28 different nationalities, all of whom were running teams. Some were supervisors, and others were senior managers. Table lists the top seven reasons they gave for disliking their meetings.

Table 1-1 Top Seven Reasons People Hate Their Meetings

This item is a travesty. It takes about five to ten minutes tops to create a decent structure to a meeting; its not a lot of hard work. All it involves is knowing the items you want to deal with and putting them into some kind of sensible order without leaving the toughest subject to last.

That this appears at the top of the list shows you that meeting leaders arent bothering to do even a tiny amount of thinking before getting into a room. If they dont, why should anyone else? (See Chapter for how to design a great agenda.)

What this implies is that meeting management skills are poor and that people running meetings cant steer productive participation. What we see in practice is that the chair or manager of a meeting often gets caught up in the conversation. So they are talking rather than thinking about whats happening and how to keep it all on track. (Read Chapter for the skills it takes to keep a meeting on track.)