What Are Meetings For?
Why lazy meeting behavior is ruining our work
I am in a constant battle with meetings.
As a freelancer, I have multiple clients, projects, and organizations that I interface with regularly. As a project manager, I am also the person on the team trying to corral information, ensure things are getting done, and establish transparent systems and procedures.
These two combined roles mean that my calendar is full of meetings, many of which I’ve initiated to get or disseminate critical information, solve common problems, or co-develop strategies.
Every client and project I work with necessitates a different approach to information sharing and collaboration based on the cadence of the work and the roles of the people involved. Meetings are just one mechanism to accomplish these things but are relied on too heavily across almost all business contexts.
Meetings are the laziest way to get or give information to a group of people, but the catch-22 is that we’re so inundated by meetings that we don’t have the time and space to think more intentionally about the structures that make our work…work.
Meetings can be part of an effective organizational management strategy, but in most instances, they’re not.
