Followers of the Bach Seat know that passwords suck. As a Project Manager, something that also sucks are bad meetings. Meetings that don’t have an agenda or a goal or a purpose will suck the motivation out of people coming to the meeting. In the interest of having fewer sucky meetings here are some meetings, your team will thank you for eliminating or fixing.
The Monday morning staff meeting
The problem with this meeting is that no one is ever ready for it. After all, it’s 8:00 a.m. on Monday morning. Nothing has happened yet and whatever happened last week is mostly ancient history. A second problem with this meeting is that for anyone to be ready, they have to work Sunday night. That is fine on occasion but guaranteed to earn you some serious votes for “jerk of the year” from employees and the family members of employees. For a while, I worked for an insomniac boss who would fire off emails off at 2:00 AM on Sunday. She would expect answers at 8:00 AM meetings. It was a happy day when she moved on.
The third problem with this meeting is that stuff happens on the weekends. And stuff needs to be addressed, especially in IT. Did you change your tapes? Check your logs? Walk your data center? Are there warning lights? How many tickets are there? Who has time for a meeting? The solution: if you must run a team meeting on Monday, push it to later in the morning or early in the afternoon. Better yet, push it to Tuesday morning.
The Round-the-Table status meeting
We have all been there. It’s the meeting where focus moves around the room and everybody shares their latest updates, sagas, fantasies, and dreams. Sit in the wrong place and you end up as the 19th person to offer an update. By that time nobody cares because their bladders are over-strained and brains numb from the politically oriented updates emanating from the mouths of colleagues in far-away functions.
The solution: meet if you must, but set some rules on the updates. Ask people to focus on important news that impacts everyone or on challenges that need help from across functions. Do anything to limit the painful march of gratuitous and self-serving status updates that undisciplined round-the-table meetings generate.
Recurring meetings with no purpose
Any recurring meeting where no one can remember why this meeting still takes place is a candidate for immediate elimination. The laws of physics transfer to meetings. A meeting on the schedule tends to stay on the schedule long after it has used up its usefulness in the workplace.
The solution: review all the recurring meetings that you subject your team to or that you are a participant in. Drop them from your life and the lives of your team members. If you are not the host of the meeting, tell the host of your intention and of your perspective on the utility of the meeting. If you are the host/sponsor, poll team members and give them a voice and a vote. A bit of draconian slicing of recurring meetings opens up valuable time for other more important activities.
Group wordsmithing
Th
is is any meeting where you pull together a group of people to work on the wording for something. Be it a vision, a mission, a strategy statement, a scope statement in project management. The output of these sessions is typically a series of awkwardly constructed sentences reflecting compromises on the part of the HPPiO. Everyone nods their heads, yes but no one agrees with the final product. The wording moves beyond ridiculous to just awful in trying to make the pain go away.
The solution: never relegate rough wording of anything to a committee. Take a stab at the item in question yourself. Then bounce it off a few colleagues. When you approach something that is beginning to work for you, very carefully ask for comments from a group. Ask clarifying questions, take great notes and then disappear and redraft the statement(s). Repeat the process as necessary.
Death by PowerPoint
Death by PowerPoint is a phenomenon that can make any meeting suck. The poor use of presentation software causes Death by PowerPoint (DBPP) according to TargetTech. Key contributors to DBPP include confusing graphics, slides with too much text, and presenters whose idea of a good presentation is to read 40 slides out loud.
Audiences that are emotionally disconnected from the presentation are the fault of the presenter. There is a good chance that the speaker has not spent enough time and effort thinking about which key points he wants the audience to take away. Or she has spent entirely too much time and effort setting up the presentation in PowerPoint.
DBPP can be avoided if the speaker uses the technology as a visual aid to enhance what is being said. Do not rely on the technology to serve as the focus of the presentation. Don McMillan demonstrates what not to do with PowerPoint in his video “Life after Death by PowerPoint.”
How to be better at meetings
Meetings are opportunities ripe for overuse and even abuse. Strive to be the manager that respects the power and importance of meetings. Use these forums to focus on key issues and solicit ideas. To keep your meetings constructive you need to start with respect.
Respect the time that everyone puts into the sessions. Start your meetings on time. If your meeting starts on time there are fewer chances to derail others’ productivity throughout the day. Starting on time also helps you to end on time. This is crucial because once the time slot for the meeting is over, employees will start to mentally check out whether you’ve made it through the agenda.
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Bad meetings suck so much that the Project Management Institute (PMI) added a section to the Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK) on meetings. that right – In version 5 of the PMBOK Integration Knowledge Area, there are four processes that have “Meetings” as a Tool & Techniques.
- 4.3 Direct and Manage Project Work
- 4.4 Monitor and Control Project Work
- 4.5 Perform Integrated Change Control
- 4.6 Close Project or Phase
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
