Page 194 - Make Work Great

Mobilizing Groups

Quick Video: Meeting Types—Information vs. Solution

Visit www.MakeWorkGreat.com for a short video segment about how
to recognize and utilize the two types of meetings. This is also an easy
bit of information to share if you’re trying to describe the contents of
this chapter to a trusted friend or colleague.

ate one together! If you’ve ever experienced the pain of a group of a
dozen or more people trying to come to a conclusion about a problem,
you know that as the number of participants exceeds seven or eight,
it becomes progressively more diffi cult for people to be heard, much
less understand each other and come to a real agreement.
Many meetings are created, intentionally or accidentally, with the
dual purposes of informing and problem solving. Perhaps a group of
coworkers at a weekly staff update takes a few minutes to answer a pol-
icy question before moving forward. Maybe the fi nancial subcommit-
tee of the board of directors steps away from an all-day board retreat
during lunch to come up with some recommendations to share with the
group in the afternoon. Combinations like these can lead to useful, pro-
ductive output, or they can lead to confusion, agitation, and delays.
From your perspective as a culture builder, the difference between
success and failure lies—as always—in overtness and clarity. In the
context of meetings, this means the plain and correct defi nition of
the meeting’s logistics, attendance, content, and timing. While it may
be impossible to bring all of the facets of the meeting into the open
(infl uencing group politics, for example, is far beyond the scope of
this book), the more you can use your own role-modeling to help a
group become more purpose-driven in its function, the better off you
and the rest of the participants will be.

The Meeting Specification: Beyond “Agenda”
It may surprise you that this book, with its complex and novel
topic, would address such a seemingly basic issue as writing down

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