In our daily work, face-to-face group meetings – such as board meetings, staff meetings, team meetings, management meetings, and project meetings – are where many of our conversations take place. These meetings often consume a significant portion of our work time, but unfortunately, they are rarely productive or satisfying.
It’s clear that there is a pressing need to improve these meetings. That’s where Conversational Leadership can come into play. Let’s explore how this approach can help us enhance the effectiveness of these meetings.
There are several different types of meetings. For example:
- Status Update Meetings
- Decision-Making Cafés
- Information Sharing Cafés
- Problem-Solving Meetings
- Opportunity Meetings
- Brainstorming Meetings
- Innovation Meetings
- Team Building Meetings
Status Update Meetings
Far too many status meetings run predictably.
The meeting starts with announcements from the manager who has called the meeting.
They then go around the room and ask each direct report to update them on what has happened in their area since the last meeting.
I call this a “hub and spoke” style meeting, as conversations only take place between the manager running the meeting and the individuals involved. There is precious little, if any, dialogue between the participants themselves.
If the conversation ever does become more inclusive, it happens at random, and even then, the quieter, more reflective people never get the chance (or take the chance or are given the opportunity) to speak.
Such open conversations are also frequently quashed by the meeting manager, supposedly to save time but in reality to maintain control.
If you wish to engage everyone, allow everyone to share their thoughts and opinions, and encourage the quieter members to speak up, adopt a Knowledge Café format.
Brainstorming Meetings
Decision-Making Meetings
Meetings in General
- Connection before content
Even if people know each other well, it makes sense to allow time for networking and chit-chat before the main meeting starts, especially if they do not work together.
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Things Todo
- Hold more conversations and fewer meetings.
Resources
- Harvard Business Review: Hold Conversations, Not Meetings
- Harvard Business Review: Stop Calling Every Conversation a “Meeting”
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I agree with the idea of moving from the current meeting style “to a knowledge cafe format”; but I feel, that we would need some special types of knowledge cafe format, one type for each type of meeting (decision meeting, information meeting, problem solving meeting, etc.). Since the goal of such meetings is different from a typical knowledge cafe, then also the format should be different, I suppose.
Agan, let me give this some thought Marco :-) I alreday have a Knowedge Café Applications chapter
https://conversational-leadership.net/category/knowledge-cafe-applications/
that starts to describe various formats of Café for different purposes.
thanks David