14 Meetings
Meetings embody and reveal your team culture. They expose who has the power, who gets listened to, and who feels comfortable speaking up.
Minette Norman, The Boldly Inclusive Leader.
I wish I could go to more meetings today
No one—ever.
Ants do not have meetings. How can they accomplish so much as a group? Oh, wait.
The absolute worst is the pre-meeting: a meeting to prepare for the meeting.
14.1 Introduction
From The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Lencioni (2002) we know the importance of engaging in productive, ideological, and honest debate and conflict. The single most important arena for conflict and conflict resolution in teams is the meeting.
If we want to work on high-performing teams—who doesn’t?—then we should look forward to being in meetings. Yet the opposite is true: we dread meetings. We dread them because they are boring, we dread them because so many are a waste of time (the meeting that could have been an e-mail), keeping us from more important and interesting things. We dread them because they can be acrimonious, uncomfortable, stressful. We dread the status posturing and pontificating by some people while others are trying not to get stuck with extra work as the result of the meeting.
Lencioni (2002) asks an interesting question: why do we prefer going to a movie rather than a meeting? After all, movies are typically longer than meetings, they are not interactive, you cannot engage with the actors on screen, you cannot speak up or comment in the theater. Movies have no direct impact on our lives. You might feel like a superhero when leaving the theater, but the movie has not turned you into one; the feeling wears off. Meetings, on the other hand, can have a direct impact on our lives, personally and professionally.
If meetings were more like movies, would we enjoy them more? The one thing all movies worth watching have in common is, …, wait for it, conflict. The flaws and internal struggles that connect us to the character. Buzz Lightyear is a toy that does not realize he is a toy. Shrek struggles against being seen as a horrible outcast, an ogre. James Bond struggles against Blofeld, Largo, or Dr. No. The resolution of the struggle creates suspense.
Meetings that are more like movies are loaded with conflict. That does not mean shooting at each other across the room or an outbreak of fisticuffs, but an honest debate of something worth debating.