Teams

Articles: Teams

Meeting Creep

I was having a chat the other day with a peer about the struggles we each have with “meeting creep”.

This is a medically diagnosable condition with the primary symptom being the inexplicable expansion of meetings into every crevice and corner of your schedule.

Meetings are fine if they (a) serve a specific purpose, (b) will provide you or the team with something needed in order to get the job done and (c) are the best way to disseminate important information that is timely and urgent. But some of us collect standing meetings like baseball cards and soon our entire schedule is full of marginally useful conversation about projects we’re loosely attached to.

Here are a few thoughts to help stem meeting creep:
1. Set a specific time frame for the meeting. Once that time expires, meeting over. Period. Honor this – no exceptions. It will keep people engaged if they know when the meeting will be over.

2. If you’re leading a meeting, start the meeting by asking what everyone needs out of it. Once everyone has what they need, the meeting is over. Tell participants that it’s their responsibility to get out of the meeting what they need.

3. Begin each week by looking at your schedule and asking if there are any meetings that could be canceled or handled with a quick conversation involving two or three people.

4. Give people permission to excuse themselves from a meeting if they don’t need anything or have nothing to add.

5. Reward especially productive meetings in some way. Meetings are an important culture-builder within our organizations and if we associate productive meetings with rewards we are more likely to gravitate toward more effective get-togethers.

Because of the highly collaborative nature of creative work, meetings are a necessity. This is not an “anti-meeting” rant. But we must do our best to ensure that meetings aren’t sucking the life out of us or preventing us from doing what we are really paid to do – create value.

Any other “meeting creep” tips? Anything you’ve found effective?

photo credit: clagnut

Generous

One of the central practices of a conversational team is that there is a high degree of trust, and that often stems from a culture of generosity.

Generosity is a word that we love to use in a theoretical sense but putting into practice can be a challenge. The real indicator of our generosity comes when we are faced with a decision to limit our own gain for someone else’s benefit. But generosity doesn’t always mean sacrifice. In fact, what we often find as we engage generously and release our grasp of things we think we need to survive is that other, unexpected benefits come our way. (Things like trust, confidence, collaborative energy and the satisfaction of a job well done.) And it’s hard to judge the overall impact of these things on our creativity and productivity. There is rarely a one to one correlation between these intangibles and our creative output but the influence is undeniable.

The difficulty of engaging in a life of generous engagement stems from our inability to make generous decisions in the moment. This is why I prefer to consider generosity a practice that must be developed. It’s something that we have to consciously engage in for a period of time before it becomes second nature.

In his book Change Or Die [amazon link] Alan Deutschman proposes that there are three elements present in any kind of lasting change: relationship, repetition and reframing of worldview. I think that this gives us a good framework for thinking about generosity and how to interject it into our daily thought and organizational life. We must (1) have another person (preferably a leader or manager) with whom we are sharing our attempts to be more generously engaged so that they can help us stay focused and keep us on task, (2) practice generosity as a core ethic until it becomes second-nature and then it will (3) reframe how we see the world.

The ethic of generous engagement is core to a healthy, thriving creative team and, more than that, is critical to our own ability to create at a high capacity over long periods of time. It seems counter-intuitive, but the more we give away the more we get in return. But we have to be watching for it when it arrives.

Photo credit: darkpatator

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