Meetings

Why hold meetings?

All meetings are used for one or more of these objectives:

To manage, control and delegate work.

To allow work to be organised and controlled by people with responsibility for certain areas of work. Participants at meetings bring with them sets of skills, talents, knowledge and experience, so as to use them in the most effective way for the benefit of the credit union. Meetings can be used to co-ordinate tasks and problems between functions or operational areas of the credit union.

To collect and process information or ideas.

To receive reports, assess whether they are telling us of a deviation from an accepted standard, and whether action is required. To gather ideas or suggestions, pool information and pass on decisions or information to those who need to know. Meetings can throw up new or creative ideas. A meeting is not usually the most efficient way to disseminate information; but it is a good means of evaluating it.

To solve problems and take decisions.

To reach decisions as a body – on policy or for executive action.  A group’s judgement is generally more balanced than that of an individual, as a result groups tend to make fewer gross errors. They are therefore better placed to make decisions. The best meetings are called to promote action; to respond to change; to resolve disagreements; to decide between alternative courses of action. Groups are not good at analysing problems that need expert knowledge or subtle reasoning; in both cases a group will think only as well as its most competent member. A decision made by a meeting will carry more weight than one made by an individual: but it will be made more slowly and at greater cost.

For communication, co-ordination and liaison.

Meetings satisfy a deep instinct in all of us to communicate with others and to share common problems, opinions, and attitudes.. If we have to live with meetings, it is worth putting a little effort into making them more effective, successful and ….. even more enjoyable.

To increase commitment and involvement.

Meetings can inspire. The support of the group energizes and motivates individuals to perform better. Meetings allow and encourage individuals to:

• get involved in the plans and activities of the credit union
• relate what we are doing to the work of others
• share our knowledge and experience
• they improve the performance of individual skills

and often, combined efforts are more effective and more productive than individual contributions.

For negotiation or conflict resolution.

To resolve a dispute or argument between people, departments or roles. To air a grievance, or for carrying out an inquest or inquiry into the past.

When meetings are facilitated well, they are one of the most valuable communication tools a credit union director can have. To top it off, if you are the Chair or president in one of these well-managed meetings, you demonstrate one of the most impressive communication skills there is – that of skilfully facilitating and presenting information to a group.

Some of these functions may well be combined. Some will overlap. It will be apparent that groups will behave differently and will need to be organised differently, managed differently, for each of these functions. Some of the major difficulties with groups arise because the same group is expected simultaneously to perform two different functions. A credit committee meeting, for instance, which sets out to define the role of loan officers will not proceed very satisfactorily to a discussion of the long-term plans for the credit union. This does not mean that the same collection of individuals cannot perform two or more different functions. But they need to see themselves as a different group in order to do so. Thus the functions need to be separated by time, or place, or title.

Since meeting facilitation skills are so important, why don’t people use them more often? Most people have never been taught effective meeting facilitation skills. They learn to conduct meetings by watching others conduct meetings – and, of course, the people they observe usually haven’t been taught effective meeting facilitation skills either. So the bad habits continue. People continue to hold meetings without really knowing why and the meetings continue to be poorly run. This module aims to help credit union directors overcome some of these shortcomings.

Why do some meetings fail and What goes wrong with meetings?

• The meeting might have been unnecessary. The business on the agenda could have been carried out by any two of the members, meeting after work, or even by making a phone call.
• The meeting was poorly prepared or too little notice was given, so some people were unable to attend, and others were unable to prepare adequately for it.
• It was not necessary for some of the members to be present as they could not make a useful contribution to the meeting.
• The members had too little information about the purpose of this meeting? Was it to be informal? Was the member expected to bring any specialised information – figures, statements, etc.- with them?
• There was no proper agenda. Items were in the wrong order of priority. There were serious omissions.
• Poor timing. It’s the wrong time of day/week/month/year to make the decision; the meeting fails to start or end on time; people arrive late or leave early. There was not sufficient time allowed for the meeting.
• Poor environment. The venue is inappropriate or uncomfortable; facilities are poor; disruptions destroy concentration. The room was too small, too noisy, too hot, too cold, poorly and uncomfortably furnished.
• Poor Chairing – lacked proper control. The procedures of the meeting were unclear; timekeeping was appalling; the discussion rambled from point to point; hidden agendas hijacked the proceedings; conflict, when it occurred, was not properly managed. Blame for any or all of these problems is usually laid at the feet of a weak Chair; but a dictatorial Chair, who represses discussion rather than controlling it, can be just as damaging.
• Poor decision-making. The group has inadequate information -or too much information, which creates confusion. The group may be too large to create consensus, or too small to allow adequate debate. The meeting breaks up without agreement.

An ineffective meeting wastes our time, fills us with frustration, achieves nothing, hinders further progress or undoes the good work already done. We know to our cost that too many meetings are hopelessly time-consuming.

The cost of meetings – and of failure

Meetings are one of the most common forms of communication to get business done. But they are also probably the most expensive.

How much does a board meeting cost? Recall the last board meeting you attended, and spend a few moments estimating its cost. You will need to include:

• Wages and Salaries. Apart from staff we are all volunteers. But if the credit union had to pay for the employment costs of everyone attending, what would it come to?
• Administration costs before and after the meeting
• Travel expenses
• Equipment costs or hiring charges
• Venue charges
• Stationery, photocopying, printing, postage
• Telephone charges (before or, in a teleconference, during the meeting)
• Refreshments
• Lost opportunity costs (while CU staff are not serving members, for example)

Ask yourself: does the cost reflect the quality of discussion and decision making in the meeting?

Stages of group development

A meeting is a group. There are many lessons to be learned from the extensive studies done on groups, this section and the next one look at two of these lessons.

Groups mature and develop. Like individuals they have a fairly clearly defined growth cycle. Occupational psychologists have identified four stages in group development.

Forming. This is when the individuals have just got together and are still wary of each other. This stage is characterised by

• anxiety
• talking about the purpose of the group
• the definition and the title of the group, its composition, leadership pattern and life-span
• at this stage, too, individuals want to establish their personal identity within the group, to make some individual impression.

The group leader must quickly strengthen the group by identifying what binds it together, and by stating the meeting ground rules

Storming. Most groups go through a conflict stage when the preliminary consensus is challenged and then re-established. Aspects such as purpose, leadership and other roles, norms of work and behaviour are challenged, but the group wants to survive. A lot of personal agendas may be revealed and a certain amount of inter-personal hostility generated. This period of storming leads to a new and more realistic setting of objectives, procedures and norms. Members who conform will internalise the group’s values and label non-conformists as “dissidents”.

Norming. The group finds a common set of values. Thus there is general acceptance as to:

• when and how the group should work
• how it should take decisions
• what type of behaviour is appropriate
• the level of work and commitment
• the degree of openness, trust and confidence

A sense of the team emerges.

Performing. Only when the three previous stages have been successfully completed will the group be at full maturity, working towards a common goal, and able to be fully and sensibly productive.

Some kind of performance will be achieved at all stages of development but it is likely to be impeded by the other processes of growth and by individual agendas. In many groups that meet regularly (eg. Monthly board meetings) the leadership issue, individuals roles within the board, or the purpose of the meeting, are recurring topics that crop up at every meeting in some form or other, seriously hindering the true work of the group.

When the task is very important, when the individuals are highly committed to the group, or when individual and group objectives are identical then these stages will be much less obvious. Certainly the group will ‘grow up’, will mature very rapidly and reach its optimum performance level. However, more often the issues are not dealt with specifically and the group’s maturing process is driven underground, particularly the ‘storming’ stage. When this occurs you have the backstage covert politicking, the hidden agendas, and the abuse of negative power.

Making meetings more effective

In general, what can be said about groups and the things they are good at? Here are some comments:

• They are essential for organisational effectiveness in that they provide the cells within the honeycomb.
• Groups, though producing fewer ideas in total, produce better ideas in the sense that they are better evaluated, more thought through.
• Groups, rather surprisingly, take riskier decisions than the individuals comprising them would have done if they had been acting independently.

Meetings will not improve by magic. People must want to change, and be willing to implement it.. Change will start with each of us at the next board meeting.