Types of Meetings

There are four types of meetings that typically take place in business settings. Each type of meeting serves a different purpose and has specific features that should be considered when planning and executing them. The four types of meetings are status updates, innovation, decision-making, and team building. As we review these descriptions, think about the groups and organizations to which you belong. You will likely be able to identify specific experiences from your own background of times you may have participated as a member of one of the four types.

Status Update Meetings

Status update meetings enable team members to share current information about their progress on a project, activity, or regular job functions. For example, nurses and doctors routinely meet at the beginning of their shifts to update each other on what is happening with each patient under their care. The update allows doctors to know what they need to focus on or accomplish during their shift and helps them plan accordingly. Status update meetings among some groups may happen as frequently as two or three times per day, or as infrequently as once per quarter for groups in other organizations.

The goal of a status update meeting is to ensure that all team members are in sync towards a project, goal, or overall outcome. The shared information is important for enabling team members to plan the next steps toward their individual milestones within the project. Effective status meetings benefit the project manager by providing timely task updates; but are also beneficial for the entire team by providing a space for recognizing milestones, sharing information, and raising awareness of problems or potential issues with the team (Brownlee, 2008).

There are two types of status update meetings: in-group and cross-group. An in-group meeting involves only those team members who contribute directly to the success of the project or outcome. The focus is on reporting each member’s progress, delegating emergent tasks, and adjusting timelines as necessary for completing the project. For example, a group of software developers may hold a status update meeting for releasing a highly anticipated software upgrade for an application, where one teammate shares their progress on the user interface, another shares on the back-end development, and another shares on the media asset design. An in-group status update meeting may involve a great deal of technical talk or jargon about the project.

In cross-group status update meetings, representatives of one group report their overall project status to representatives from another group. For example, a software development director may report the status of the anticipated application upgrade to representatives of the web development and marketing teams. The goal of these cross-group meetings is for each department to align their individual projects with each other and within the company’s overall goals. A cross-group status update meeting may involve aspirational or what can be referred to as “big picture” talk about the benefits of a particular project or initiative on the organization as whole.

Sometimes, status update meetings will not merely be an information sharing session. While giving a status update, a team member may mention a problem that he or she is facing, which may then lead to the group diagnosing the member’s issue and offering solutions. We will discuss facilitating problem-solving sessions later in this chapter.

Innovation Meetings

Innovation meetings are designed to develop a creative solution or list of possible solutions to a specific problem. Examples of problems that might be addressed in this type of meeting include reducing waste in a manufacturing facility, or increasing customer satisfaction in a retail sales department. Innovation meetings are founded on the process of problem solving which involves encountering an undesirable situation, identifying a barrier that prevents the situation from improving, and establishing a preferred outcome.

Researchers and executives in communications, collaboration, and technology at MeetingSift describe innovation meetings as opportunities for participants to build off on another’s ideas, creating synergy. Synergy occurs when individuals’ combined effects result in a better product or idea than what each individual could have come up with on their own. The goal of an innovation meeting is to develop a creative workable solution to a problem while taking into account the constraints and possible threats of groupthink. Constraints are criteria that a solution must meet in order for it to be considered workable. For example, your company may want a solution to the manufacturing waste problem that does not involve spending any money; so one constraint will be the budget. You may then develop a low- or no-cost solution to reduce waste that will take three months to implement; however, your company must have the waste reduced in less than a month, so a timeline might be considered another constraint. Other types of constraints can include corporate policies, local laws/regulations, ethical principles, cultural considerations, and labor shortages, to name a few.

Groupthink occurs when team members do not critically evaluate their own ideas due to an illusion of consensus or pluralistic ignorance. An illusion of consensus can occur when certain team members express favoritism towards an idea and other team members who are critical of the idea merely “go along” with it to avoid conflict because they do not want to “rock the boat.” Groupthink can also occur due to pluralistic ignorance. Perhaps a group member truly buys into an idea thinking that if there was a problem with it, another “smarter” group member would have spoken up against it. That “smarter” group member may also buy into the idea, thinking that if there was a problem with it, another group member would have said something, and so on. You can easily see the problem here. Groupthink can lead to teams making faulty decisions, and innovation meetings should be designed to prevent this.

Decision-Making Meetings

Decision-making meetings involve choosing between different courses of action to achieve an outcome. For example, a hiring committee will hold a decision-making meeting to decide which candidate best fits a job role or position. A private company’s upper management may hold a decision-making meeting to decide whether to go public on the New York Stock Exchange. While innovation meetings involve decision-making as well, the key difference is that decision-making meetings are designed to focus on choosing from a limited list of possible solutions (e.g., Candidate A vs Candidate B, going public vs remaining private).

The goal of a decision-making meeting is to develop a clear decision about an issue. Depending on the power structure of the organization, a decision-making meeting may require 100% unanimity among key members to be implemented. Such unanimity can be difficult to achieve, depending on the complexity of the issue in question and the sophistication of the members involved. Others may require 2/3 of member agreement or a simple majority of 51%. These are democratic arrangements, however. Some organizational power structures may be autocratic and require that only one person (perhaps the business owner) be the sole decision maker. In those cases, the subordinate group members serve more as advisors to the key decision maker and give their input in hopes that it will sway the decision maker towards a certain outcome.

In either of these arrangements, the ability to facilitate an effective decision-making meeting is crucial to ensuring groupthink does not occur and that the best option for the organization and its members is selected. We’ll discuss how to facilitate decision-making meetings further in the chapter.

Team Building

The final type of meeting we’ll discuss is the team building meeting. These meetings are designed to primarily build a sense of camaraderie while sometimes secondarily achieving small goals or unique tasks. A team building meeting may involve a group going to a local restaurant or pub after hours, a product kick-off meeting, or even planning a physical activity like bowling, golf, or softball. If the meeting is a bit more formal, there may also be an opportunity for members to exchange opinions about the corporate team-building event that happened earlier in the day.

Many companies actively try to attract and maintain talent by cultivating a “fun” or “laid back” work culture. Team building meetings also help create and maintain such a culture by allowing members to not only discuss task-oriented matters (project deadlines, budget questions, etc.), but naturally personally-oriented ones as well (weekend plans, hobbies, beer preferences, etc.). Discussing such topics allows team members to not only be co-workers, but to also develop valuable friendships.

When planning a team-building meeting, decide whether the nature of the gathering will allow the team to focus on accomplishing a task. If a loud venue with poor seating is chosen, it may be best to just consider it a social event where people merely socialize and to not expect to hold any sort of formal business. Also understand that if a quiet pub is chosen with good seating, for example, that any tasks the team is expected to accomplish should be simple and noncontroversial. Asking a team for their opinions about a light topic might be workable, but asking them to do a budget review or a complete brainstorming session would probably not go well.

Summary

Overall, there are four types of meetings. Even if you do not aspire to a leadership or management position within an organization, it is realistic to assume you will at some point be asked to facilitate a formal business meeting. Decide which type of meeting is appropriate for the situation and then design the meeting to achieve its intended purpose. Designing a productive meeting involves structuring an agenda strategically and facilitating accordingly. In the remaining sections of this chapter, we will discuss how to write an effective agenda and facilitate each type of meeting. To begin, let’s identify the “W's of meeting planning, which we will tackle in the next section.

As you learned in the previous discussion, meetings serve many productive purposes for an organization. Meetings can allow creative ideas to be born, identify flaws in processes, and allow information to be shared effectively (Allen, Lehmann-Willenbrock, & Rogelberg, 2015). However, poorly planned meetings can be counter-productive. When you schedule a meeting and invite participants, members are being taken away from their job functions and routines to attend. An unproductive meeting can not only lead to the meeting goal not being achieved, but it inherently creates lost productivity from attendees not being able to fulfill their regular job functions during the meeting period. As a future facilitator, it is important to recognize when it is useful to call a meeting and when other formats of communication might be more productive. Moreover, if you decide it is appropriate to call a meeting, you must then be able to prepare yourself and your team effectively. According to the Harvard Business Review (2015), the work that takes place before a meeting begins is the foundation for much of the success of a meeting for both you and your team.