Universities fail to teach many important skills, including one critical to success in business and government — meeting leadership. Since managers spend between 50 and 90% of their work life trapped in meetings, one would think that training in meeting leadership would be a priority. But this is rarely the case.
A Leaders Routine Becomes a Meeting Ritual
In social psychology a ritual is, "A pattern of behavior carried out in a social setting." The Catholic Mass, a Protestant sermon, a fraternity initiation and a college commencement are some examples. If you where a space alien studying modern human organizations, it would become blindingly obvious that meetings are a key organizational ritual.
A prime example is the staff meeting. They tend occur at the same time, the same day, follow the same procedure, always run over time and are held whether or not its needed.
Staff meetings that become rituals have a mindless, automatic quality about them and the meeting leadership has a static, habitual aspect to it. The agenda never changes and the minutes are never read.
Participants complain about staff meetings, but few possess enough guts to go to challenge the leadership of the meeting and suggest improvements. Most meeting leaders, on the other hand, exist in their isolation bubble, blissfully unaware of these complaints,
Many Group Norms Are Dysfunctional
Norms are what everyone considers, well, normal. It’s the way we do things. It normal that meetings always start late and never, never end on time.
Some of these norms are easy to break, but others can take a long-time to change. For example, it’s easy to get meetings to end on time, but it’s hard to get them to start on time.
Meeting Leadership Roles are Not Well Played
One of the most critical meetings roles is that of the Chair. The chair must act as a leader, but leader is not the only leadership role that must be played. Chairs also must act as a facilitator and scribe. It's immensely difficult to do all three of these well during meetings.
Meeting Leaders Choose the Wrong Leadership Styles
Meeting leaders can act as autocratic or facilitative leaders. Effective meeting chairs use both styles. However, for reasons explained below, its better to use more of the facilitative style and less of the autocratic style.
Strong meeting leadership is important at the beginning of the meeting and at the end. People expect the chair to take charge at the beginning. Likewise, they want something to happen at the end of the meeting so that their time is not (again) wasted.
However, the autocratic style does not work well in the middle of the meeting, if one needs to engage in problem solving. While you can order people to solve the problem, group creativity and innovation requires consensus. This is were the facilitative style excels—getting collaboration and cooperation.
If one neglects paying attention to meeting leadership, meetings can devolve into an event wasting both time and money. To prevent this, meeting leaders must focus on preventing rituals, changing norms, playing the proper role and choosing the right style to get more horsepower from those assembled around the conference table.
