Managers particularly senior managers spend a lot of time in meetings. It’s the way most organisations do business so it is rather surprising that so many managers report finding the experience frequently frustrating and unproductive. Some meeting are about conveying information and issuing instructions but they always involve questions, comments, discussion, debate and in my experience arguments. I’m thinking of those Senior management team meetings which a former boss used to describe as generating more heat than light. But I am more interested in what happens after the meeting. When the argument has been won and lost. Or has it!
The same someone always finds an item on the agenda to disagree with the rest of the team about. The meeting drags on. Their tactic seems to be to prolong the debate until either we run out of time or lose the will to live. The meetings always over run, the individual simply refuse to accept the view of everyone else. The boss calls time in the mistaken belief that they have allowed the debate to go on long enough( too long) and give their decision. The dissident says nothing which we wrongly assume means they have conceded the argument. They haven’t . They have simply changed tactics. They ignore the decision. At a later date they are challenged at which point they say that the debate did not reach an agreement - they never agree to anything!
There is a lot written about how to make meetings more productive, how to structure the agenda, how to chair more effectively, how to ensure every one contributes even how to record the discussion and decisions but no so much on what happens after a the meeting. It is a very common failing in organisations not to follow through. Senior managers assume that having made the decision action will follow they are then surprised at a later date to discover it didn’t.
Blair McPherson former director author and blogger www.blairmcpherson.co.uk
