If you hadn’t planned on this meeting today, imagine what else you might be doing. That means, this had better be important.
“Hey! You have a minute?”
What happens to creative work when creative workers confront a constant stream of group meetings? Face-to-face encounters are still humanity’s best ways to communicate clear, nuanced information. They beat telephone calls; they beat teleconferences; they’re no contest compared to email or text messages. Humans have two millions years of evolution hard wiring us to recognize in-person communication cues that simply do not translate through electronic intermediaries with equivalent nuance or clarity.
But meetings are not the same as one-on-one or small group F2F conversations. They look similar, but they’re not. Speaking with people en masse is not the same thing as having private conversations. Unless carefully contained, meetings can turn into displays of plumage or power. That often means the best aspects of creative synergies can become overwhelmed with unnecessary preening, performance, and social politicking. Meetings may address things that needs to be discussed, but they are not necessarily the best way to communicate those details. Ask yourself: could these points be better communicated some other way? It’s often only a small cluster of people who really need to be in a given meeting at any one time, with a large percentage of required participants often asked to attend simply to serve as witnesses, Greek chorus, or social ballast gathered to invest greater weight to the importance of the conversation.
Am I a misanthrope? An introvert? Hardly. The issue here has to do with how to best capture the energies and strengths of team members without the meeting becoming its own self service. In other words, the meeting itself cannot become the reason for the meeting in the first place.
To creatives, concentration and inventive energies come from digging deep in the loam of a subject. That means focus, which implies time free of interruption, including any nagging trepidations that an interruption will threaten to undo that focus at any moment. If you’re working on something that requires your full concentration, constant interruptions offers a fast track to mediocre work.
But then it happens. “Hey! Do you have a minute to meet with…?”
Pop! Suddenly you’re on a telecon or a Zoom call and what could have been a brief conversation about something that needs to be done suddenly swerves into digressions about birthday parties for three-year-old nieces, stories about a surprise long weekend your comptroller planned for her spouse, and various tales about car trouble and cookie recipes and (of course) who’s dating who.
And to think: a moment ago you were fully focused on a project commanding your full attention.
Here’s a word of advice: if you don’t need to have a meeting, don’t have one. If you really only need to speak with one person, contain your ebullience and go find that ONE person. Pick up the phone, set up a Zoom call one-on-one, or best of all, get out of your overused chair to and walk down the hall to speak with your colleague in person. Before calling spontaneously for a group of people to huddle, ask yourself if they should all stop what they’re doing while they wait for a word or two where they feel relevant.
Are meetings useful? They CAN BE, and sometimes in vital ways. Ask any coach if the pre-game team meeting is something that could be skipped. Listen to any theater director’s rehearsal notes to a cast. Meetings can get teams on to the same page, can share information efficiently, can lead and inspire and ignite imaginations. What’s more, but a scheduled meeting is typically a whole lot more productive than a spontaneous one. People can plan their time, which means they can gain confidence that their creative energies will ultimately have enough respect from colleagues to be protected.
But proceed with caution. A workgroup that tends to schedule more meeting minutes then it really needs is often likely to snowball out of control. Meetings can become an undisciplined habit, an unintentional default. Meetings begin to pile up on each other’s calendars, crowding out the whole point of a creative team in the first place. Shortly thereafter, when the work suffers and morale slides and hours and days disappear into endless moments of transitioning from one thing to another, managers will hold meetings to figure out how to return to better productivity and higher levels of quality.
As a result, the means will, sadly and inevitably, justify the ends.