How to Get a Meeting Back on Track - 海外工作

大家來討論看看一下 你遇到的辦公室文化
會常常被拉去一些不關緊要的meeting
然後一待就是半天 常常造成正事沒有時間做的困擾嗎?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/bw/20070813/bs_bw/aug2007ca20070811811253

By Liz Ryan
Mon Aug 13, 8:08 AM ET

There is a lot of folklore about Microsoft (NasdaqGS:MSFT - News),
but I hope this urban legend is true: They say that at Microsoft,
at least in certain circles, you dont have to sit through boring
meetings. You have to give the presenter 10 minutes. After that,
you are free to go if youre bored or if the meeting isnt relevant
to your work. Can you imagine how empowering it would be to stand
up, smile, and waft out of the room when a meeting goes wrong? If
all of us non-Microsofties had that much leeway (and werent worried
about looking bad, making someone else look bad, or hurting our
teammates feelings), wed be out the door 10 minutes and 30 seconds
after half our weekly meetings had begun.


Why is that meetings so frequently bore us to tears? Its because of
the nature of conversation. Meetings, after all, are based on the
notion that when people sit down together, they should talk, and
talk they do. We start out with a goal in mind -- lets say, developing
a plan for the upcoming product launch -- and end up going down
ratholes, ranging from whether the companys logo colors ought to
be re-examined to why the travel budget got squashed in the last
month of the quarter. Conversation meanders. If you look forward
to meetings as a way to shoot the breeze with your colleagues, this
kind of meeting might be fine with you. But for people who have
piles of work on their desks, stuffed inboxes to deal with, and
managers breathing down their necks, ineffective meetings are a
pox. Still, there is a way to get a meeting back in order.

Better, yet, you can help a meeting start off right. And you dont
have to be the person who called the meeting, a manager, or anyone
of particular importance to do that. You only have to raise your
voice at the very beginning of the hour, and ask, "Can I get a
couple of data points about this meeting?" Ask the organizer how
long the meeting is scheduled to last, whether the meeting has a
specific objective and if so, what that objective is. Ask whether
there is a specific action item attached (not just "to discuss the
upcoming reorganization") and whether the meeting is designed to
elicit input, review, or refine an in-progress campaign or whether
it was called simply to communicate a confirmed plan of action.

Different Meetings Require Different Strategies

If youre cautious or have been burned by meandering-meeting syndrome
before, you can, of course, request this information before the
meeting begins, via an e-mail message when you first receive the
meeting invitation. You can and should decline to attend if the
meetings purpose is murky or its agenda unintelligible. These are
bad signs that an hour of your time is about to be wasted.

The last question on your list is important. Brainstorming meetings
are different from review-and-refine meetings and both of those
types are different still from meetings designed simply to
communicate a plan. Each of the three meeting types must be managed
differently from the others, so its critical to know what sort of
room youre in before the conversation gets underway. In a
brainstorming session, everyone is encouraged to submit ideas, a
nd practical implementation is held off for a future conversation.

In a review-and-refine meeting, a specific proposal is brought to
the table. If youre the organizer of a meeting like that, you
must let people know that the moment has passed for big and radical
new ideas. Your goal at this meeting is to identify any looming
problems with the plan and work to surmount them. Meeting attendees
can suggest minor changes and refinements to the program. If you
invite people to a meeting to talk about any initiative -- lets say,
the introduction of your product line into a new market -- and people
come to the meeting only to learn that the big decisions have been
made without their input, dont expect lots of enthusiasm for the
fine-tuning exercise. But if youre dealing with the same group of
people who conceived the original proposal and are game to put the
finishing touches on it, youre good to go.

No Substitute for Face Time

The last flavor of meeting is the one where someone is simply
announcing "how it's going to be" and answering questions about
it. This is the type of meeting the HR folks schedule when there
are big changes in the health-care plan or the annual performance
review schedule. If youre planning a meeting like this, make sure
people know the story: the meeting may be boring, but the cost for
non-attendance is that you dont get the answers you may need.

I am definitely in the camp that believes theres no substitute for
face-to-face communication. That being said, Im in the ADHD camp
too, and Id rather have knitting needles stuck in my eyes than sit
through a long-winded corporate team meeting. This is one situation
where more process helps. Identifying why were here, what were
going to get done, and how long its going to take us are critical
steps. After that, ensuring that everyone in the room knows the
ground rules -- whether our task is to generate ideas, refine them,
or simply ingest them for later dissemination to our teammates --
is the key.

So lets say you do all that, but 20 minutes into the meeting, there
goes Stella down a rathole, sharing her story of getting stuck in
the company parking lot with a non-functioning ID the day they
changed the security codes without telling anyone. How do you, as a
non-leader of the meeting, get people back on track? "How are we
doing on our agenda?" is always a safe question.

A bit stronger is: "Is this something we should discuss offline?"
Interpersonal relations on the team are the bees knees, and bonding
is a wonderful thing, but irrelevant conversation in a business
meeting exacts a toll on everyone present. Better to tell Stella
politely that shes meandering than to force 10 or 12 people to sit
through her monologue in agony.

If youre not lucky enough to have the right to mosey when a meeting
runs aground, do the next best thing and pull it back into the water.
Somebody has to. It might as well be you.


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