Anticlue

MIA – the productive meeting

I’ve seen a couple productive meetings at my new employer. I’ve come to realize how sorely they were missing from my old employer. At my old employer, I used to spend 6 – 8 hours in meetings reviewing the exact same topics and never obtaining a clear concise tactical or strategic direction. Those directions were done in hallway water cooler, phone call discussions. The meetings were meant to be communicative, but the same information could have been delivered in a report.

For example, the Monday meeting was a 2 hour weekly gathering of executive management of the IS organization. Now in theory, this is a great meeting potential if it had the opportunity for open collaborative team discussion which had some conflict. However in this meeting, the attention getter was a 15 – 30 minute review from the CIO of the contents of Hospital’s Executive Council. Now the information is valuable, but this should have been more of an email distributed so everyone could read. The other problem was that after 15 – 30 minutes of review, without comment from the other members of the team. Next we traversed into a policy review, significant project update, a contract review, and finally wrapping up the meeting by discussing which project where to be reviewed next time.
Items of note:

• the policies were already established and written in draft form. (Also had already been reviewed and approved by the CIO)
• the project updates, where already emailed to the team and stakeholders.
• the contract updates where just where in the process the contract was. Not what the contract was about.
• this was following a 2 hour senior executive management meeting of which the directors did not partake.

That was the Monday meeting, of which you could not miss, had to be there in person, and look thoroughly attentive. Key Participants were CIOs, Sr VPS, AVPS, and Directors. Minutes were taken and distributed to all including the director’s managers by Friday.

Next was the 2 hour leadership Tuesday Meeting, same people as the Monday meeting but including the managers and excluding the CIO. Again in theory a great meeting potential, good group of people bright minds. However in this meeting the attention getter was a 15 – 30 minute review of the minutes from the Monday meeting. Next we traversed into a status update from all teams (missing word quick). Finally we moved onto the review of the scheduled changes into production, a review of the production problems and impacts.
Items of Note:

• the project updates, where already emailed to the team and stakeholders.
• The minutes of the Monday meeting were emailed to the group that week. (So we read outloud minutes which were emailed.
• Minutes were emailed by Friday.

Between the two, I actually found the Tuesday meeting more productive with the review of changes and discussions of what happened to the environment. Open collaboration on how to avoid the mishap from ever happening again would have been welcomed. However, the environment was not structured for that type of collaboration.

So what would my recommendations be? I think the two meetings had a good concept. However first, I’d continue with the Tuesday meeting. Just change the agenda a bit.

• By Entire Leadership Team.
  • Production Events Review with a collaborative discussion on how to prevent in the future.
  • Policy discussion before it was formed. So everyone would participate and buy-in would be across the board.
• By Department
  • Project Updates with a focus on what help was needed from other teams. Also upcoming milestones.
  • Key Metrics being met or missed.
  • Change Management with a focus on impact to the customers and streamlining changes.

For the executive strategic meeting, moving it to a strategic council for maybe 2 hours once a month to discuss two items brought up for discussion from the leadership meeting would be ideal. A strategic decision and direction would be the output of the topic at hand.

For both meetings, I’d recommend starting with an attention getter which got everyone engaged and involved. Not just listening. Again just my thoughts, based upon my experience. A leadership team is powerful but not as a dysfunctional team. Being a part of a functioning leadership team is a great experience and should be treated as such.