Recently, a department released a series of knowledge sharing on Meeting Management 101. While I found many of the tips to be useful, something caught my eye in the recent sharing, which triggered me to share my thoughts and constructive feedback with the team:
I respectfully disagree with advising people to simply end meetings just because “the discussion gets contentious” and if “people are getting restless”.
We shouldn’t just end to avoid uncomfortable conversations. Sometimes ironing out disagreements are necessary and in fact the reason we organize the meeting in the first place.
If we keep pulling the plug when things get tough, we are merely procrastinating & prolonging the problem, by sweeping it under the rug and deferring it. It is precisely this attitude that makes meetings ineffective and ironically result in too many meetings!
You don’t magically get conclusive decisions by “sleeping on it”.
In fact, in my experience, quickly ironing out the discomfort is a lot more productive: either it immediately resolves the problem, or respectfully disagree so we can quickly perform course correction in another direction. Either way, we resolve the deadlock and keep moving forward!
I believe that if we want to realize our Cultural Beliefs of “Speak Up” and “Courage to Act”, we need to train ourselves to own up and normalize difficult conversations, to iron them out in a respectful, professional manner.
Advising people to end meetings when discussions get contentious might defeat that purpose altogether.
And this principle also applies in contexts outside of the workplace, such as speaking to our family and friends. Especially in parenting. Yes, advising others, calling towards good and forbidding others against evil can be very uncomfortable. That's life. Double down and keep moving.
If the leaders, parents and teachers don't step up to confront uncomfortable conversations, then who will?
Also, it’s incorrect to simply end when “people are getting restless”. I find this ‘when to end’ tip very misleading and counter-productive to the reason you have the meeting in the first place
Firstly, in a virtual environment (of which 50% of us are still working in on rotation basis), you can never truly gauge people’s “restlessness”.
Secondly: if people are getting restless, so what??
Is that their problem, or my problem?
By the way, people also get restless listening to Friday sermon / khutbah jumaat. Should we stop the sermon?
If we haven’t fulfilled our objectives, why should we postpone or end the meeting because some fellas get bored?
Coming from engineering, we participate many engineering reviews and technical discussions, which can be very tiring, but are necessary steps. As a certified Risk Assessment facilitator myself conducting dozens of reviews, I do observe that team members feel tired very early on in these sessions. These sessions involve a lot of high value TP manhours, and takes a lot of effort to organize. Postponing and deferring results in a lot of unnecessary re-work, especially if we have a different quorum.
Yes, I acknowledge that sometimes it could be due to my poor facilitation skills or un-engaging approach. So fix that first.
Perhaps we need to enhance our facilitation and engagement skills and, in a dopamine-hooked digital age, train ourselves to be more attentive, but this definitely does NOT mean we just pull the plug.
But Allah knows best, that's just my humble perspective. What do you think?
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