Page 195 - Make Work Great

Leading Your Crystal

the logistics of a meeting. We all know that meetings need agen-
das and invitations, don’t we? But please resist the temptation to
skip reading this section on the grounds that you already know
what it contains. A quick survey of the meeting practices in most
organizations—even those touted as having highly effective meet-
ings—regularly turns up the same result: meetings are a consistent
source of frustration, ineffi ciency, stress, and waste. In the crystal-
line workplace, group interactions are absolutely necessary, yet in
some organizations, the word meetings has a connotation bordering
on the obscene. Meetings are the bane of existence for executives,
managers, and individual contributors alike. Much of the frustra-
tion—issues like “Why am I here?” “What are we doing?” “We’re
going in circles,” and “No one’s prepared”—can be traced back to
the absence of comprehensive defi nitions or specifi cations for the
gathering.
As a culture builder whose reach is increasing, you’ll need to
become comfortable with the use of meeting specifi cations within
your own sphere of infl uence. It’s not enough to simply list some
topics of discussion and call it an agenda. A specifi cation is far more
comprehensive. The good news is that, like many of the concepts in
this book, the construction of a meeting specifi cation is simple in
principle. It doesn’t require advanced training or skills. All you need
is the disciplined investment of suffi cient time, time spent getting very
specifi c about the purpose, objective, attendance, roles, responsibili-
ties, and fl ow of the meeting.

Constructing the Specifi cation
Having addressed the highest-level purpose of the meeting (to inform,
solve, or both), your second step is to become more specifi c regarding
the meeting’s objective. You should write this as a short, one- or two-
sentence statement of the overall goal for the gathering. The objective
answers the question of “why” you’re asking participants to come
together. With your objective in place, you can create an attendee list
to identify required participants, optional participants, and interested
nonparticipants. Individual participants should also be assigned spe-

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