imapMyTeam Blog

Meeting Madness

Meetings generally have a bad reputation.  In part that rap is deserved and, in part, undeserved.

It is not the meeting itself, or the sheer number of meetings you attend that you are really objecting to – it is HOW the meeting unfolds that ultimately colors your impression of it and then you characterize it as – ‘good,’  ‘bad’ or maybe worse.

Running a meeting that is universally hailed as a ‘good meeting’ is a lot harder than following all of the established guidelines for making meetings effective.  You could follow all of those guidelines perfectly and still have a meeting that someone perceives as flawed.

That occurs because in every meeting you will have participants with motivational needs from each of the four, imapMyteam quadrants. Your meeting is simultaneously being evaluated –at a minimum – in four distinctively different ways.

Go to the My Teams report and select the needs tab.  Here you will see which quadrant your colleagues reside in.  Red and blue needs are opposite of each other as are yellow and green needs.  That means if you are managing the meeting according to what a Red needs person expects, you are probably annoying  all of the participants with Blue needs. The Reds judge it a great meeting and the blues are frustrated because they haven’t been heard. 

If you stick to a defined meeting agenda, those with Yellow needs are pleased as it satisfies their desire for order.  However, those with Green needs would feel that the meeting lacked the flexibility to adapt the agenda in order to address unexpected, but important, topics.  They may think the meeting was ‘too rigid’.  You can see that it would be easy to polarize the team simply by the way the meeting was structured.

To help you expand your thinking on how to avoid “Meeting Madness”, please review the attachment to this email titled ‘Meeting the Needs of the Meeting’ to get some ideas on how to structure a meeting to meet everyone’s expectations.

 If you are not in charge of running meetings you can still influence what happens in the meeting. Start by making sure you understand your own needs first. Communicate those needs to whoever runs the meetings you attend so they understand what contributes to your effectiveness.

The payoff is you’ll get more value from the meeting and you won’t derail the meeting by slipping into behaviors that slow things down.