When someone brings up the idea of meetings, one of the first responses is a sigh. We've all been in poorly run meetings, where they're nearly a waste of time and energy sink. Not only are the quality of meetings often bad, but the frequency is nearly too much to handle.
I'm the first one to call out that in many cases, meetings are completely unnecessary. Maybe you need a status update from someone or simply need to revisit their current progress on a task. In some situations you can simply reach out to the people involved and get this information directly. There's no need to have a meeting and this can happen in an IM/DM, Slack, email or even face-to-face.
But there are other times when holding a meeting isn't just important, but crucial. Maybe it's a project meeting and keeping everyone updated on the current state, holding individual report outs and discussing issues will make the overall project go smoother, faster and with fewer issues along the way.
Or maybe important team members are overburdened and unresponsive to communications. In these instances, sometimes the only way to find out their progress is to get them into a meeting to discuss things as a group. Ensuring a project is successful often requires using all the means necessary to keep forward momentum going.
Another reason how meetings can be useful, is to bring a team together. It's common for individual contributors to be off and on their own, especially with senior employees, and bringing everyone together for status updates, discussion of obstacles and planning for the future can be critical.
And of course, meetings are necessary for one-on-one's, particularly between a manager and their subordinate. Not only does this create opportunities to build upon the working relationship, but it gives ample time for career growth discussions, current performance and ways a manager can help along the way.
We're never going to entirely get rid of meetings within our workweek. But we can focus on making them more effective, less of an energy drain and an important component in communication. More on this in future posts.