When to Have a Meeting

Figure 8.1 Gantt Chart

The deliverable serves two critical functions. First, it helps you achieve the meeting’s purpose. If you are doing a planning meeting for the next social event, having a Gantt chart will actually help you with planning the event once the meeting is over. Second, the deliverable serves as a symbol to members that the meeting was indeed productive and purposeful. Many meetings start with a purpose, but then never fulfill that purpose because the topics of discussion get “off-track” and members lose interest and may grow frustrated. By creating a tangible deliverable members can see, they will be able to appreciate the work and the time they are putting into organizational meetings because they are able to see the actual results themselves.

If you can articulate a clear purpose for the meeting that you can measure with a deliverable, then you have met the first two criteria for holding a meeting. Taking that purpose and deliverable, you must then ask yourself the following questions:

WHICH Type of Meeting?

Does the meeting purpose require the expertise of more than one person?

Suppose the purpose of the meeting was to decide next year’s training program for the whole company. The Human Resources Manager would be a great person to help decide what types of training are needed. But, you may also need someone from the financial department to ensure the company has the money to pay for the training, and maybe an operations manager who knows which departments can handle the time-off employees would need to take to attend the training. In this case, having a meeting amongst these key people would be necessary. However, if the meeting’s purpose is simply to determine whether there is any money left for training in the fiscal year, then a personal, one-on-one discussion with the finance manager would be most appropriate. The Human Resources Manager and the Operations Manager would most likely not have access to the company financials at that level, so they would not be able to contribute anything unique for that specific meeting purpose; and therefore, would not need to attend.

Does the meeting purpose require members whose tasks are interdependent?

Members at a meeting should each have interest in listening to and informing and informing each other. If each member works independently of one another so that Member A and Member C have no relevance to Member B’s performance, then Member B may question why he/she is attending. Each member who attends the meeting should have some kind of productive benefit to all of the other members.

For example, let’s say you are planning an Open House event. It would probably be productive to have the advertising manager and event planner in attendance because how the event is planned affects how it is advertised. If this Open House has nothing to do with product development, then it would not make sense to have a product developer at the meeting.

Does the meeting purpose require an open discussion among its attendees?

The unique value of formal meetings is they allow members to interact in real-time to discuss, propose, or analyze a problem. Some meeting purposes do not require this, and therefore, should not be held in the first place. For example, asking whether the sales department met its Q3 quota is a fact-based question that does not warrant much discussion. In that case, you can simply send an email to the Sales Manager and share the results in a mass email or document without taking time out of members’ schedules. However, a purpose like deciding whether to hire Candidate A or Candidate B warrants plenty of discussion and debate among members, allowing them to draw on their expertise to contribute to the discussion.

There can be exceptions to these principles. There are investigative committees that try to uncover whether a controversial fact happened. Think of the many Congressional investigations that have occurred in recent history. Though the meeting topic is factual in nature, the discovery process of the facts requires a set of members with different types of expertise who must work together to come to a firm conclusion. If you think the fact is controversial in nature or has to have a certain degree of certainty that can only be attained by drawing on several members’ expertise, then this criteria may still be upheld.

Does the meeting purpose have potential to create misunderstandings?

Meetings not only allow members to directly interact with each other and create synergy for great ideas, but they also allow members to openly communicate their concerns. Suppose there are some new complicated changes in company policy concerning the pay structure. Sending out the new changes in an email might be risky as the important details might get misunderstood or have an emotional impact on employees. In this case, it may be best to reveal the new changes in an informational meeting format with a deliverable of having employees sign a statement saying that they understood the new changes.