Page 193 - Make Work Great

Leading Your Crystal
Two Types of Meetings

Andy Grove, founder and former president of Intel Corporation, listed
effective meetings as being among the key factors in any company’s
managerial success, including his own. He defined two specifi c

types of group gatherings: “process-oriented” meetings designed
to share information and expertise on a regular basis, and “mission-
oriented” meetings designed to fulfill a specific mission and then

disband. In a broader analysis of effective group gatherings, William
2

Daniels extended this distinction, defining the purpose of regular
management meetings as the exercise of the organization’s formal
authority in the allocation of resources, and limiting the purpose of
ad hoc task forces to making recommendations for solving specifi c
3
problems. The commonalities in these and related analyses of
group effectiveness are the basis for the distinction in meeting types
presented here.

The question about the broad purpose of the gathering—to
inform, solve, or both—comes fi rst, because it carries implications
about everything else involving the meeting, including membership,
content, and process. Information transfer is an exercise in one-way
communication: the same factual or hierarchical information is put
on display for everyone to see at once. As a result, the audience can
be as small or as large as desired. The primary considerations regard-
ing the factual information are issues like clarity of presentation and
timeliness and accuracy of information. The primary considerations
regarding the hierarchical information are issues such as speaker
selection, order, ceremony, and timing.
Solution-type discussions, on the other hand, require a different
sort of construction. The membership issues that matter most are
whether you have the right experts present for the task at hand and
whether the number of people involved allows for the kind of discus-
sion and problem solving needed. An 18-person board of directors
can ratify a proposal, but good luck getting all of the members to cre-

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