One of my clients gave me a wonderful book, Death by Meetings by Patrick Lencioni. I have never read any of his other books and really enjoyed this one. It is business fiction, which as a genre I really like. Its a fictional story of the Yip Software. Some good lessons here:
- Meetings are critical to organizational communication.
- Meetings need to have Conflict and Drama for them to be successful.
- Meetings need to be of different length depending on their function: Daily check in, weekly tactical, monthly strategic and quarterly offsite.
It’s worth the 4 hours it’ll take to read the book to improve your meetings!
I agree with you that communication is critical in an organization, but I feel that meetings might not always be the “right” mechanism for this. In most cases, I would say they are the wrong one. Most organizations to often require several meetings to “get anything done”. The funny thing about this is – not only do the meetings take up valuable time but you need to spend a good chunk of time preparing for all these meetings. At least that’s been my experience.
I think the trick is to encourage openness within your company culture and never hold a meeting unless it is required. Just my thoughts.