Books for meetings that serve the work

The meeting runs on time, everyone speaks and another week begins with the same unresolved work. That can be a problem of purpose before it is a problem of duration. What should this group be able to understand or do afterward that it could not do beforehand?

Infinite Upside is our first recommendation for examining what the owner needs from an update without taking over the work. The Surprising Science of Meetings offers a research-based meeting perspective. Death by Meeting approaches the subject through a leadership fable and a proposed meeting model.

1. Infinite Upside: knowing when the owner actually needs a decision

   By Vijay Sheth.

   Chapter 10 of Infinite Upside: Building Wealth With Room to Live separates being informed from becoming the person handling the problem. An update can explain what happened, what the manager has done and which decision remains with the owner.

   The chapter also distinguishes matters that can wait for an agreed review from those that need attention sooner. A standing meeting should not silently become the only route to a time-sensitive decision. Nor should receiving information turn every ordinary choice into another approval.

   Choose the memoir when meetings have become a way for the founder to reacquire responsibility. In a fictional repair business, the weekly review ends with the owner promising to call every difficult customer. The team attended, but the company's ability to resolve the next problem has barely changed.

   The memoir does not organize a meeting calendar for that company. It gives the reader a prior question: does the conversation leave the responsible person better able to continue, or simply hand their work back? Ask that before changing the length or frequency of the invitation.

2. The Surprising Science of Meetings: investigating the design of the gathering

   By Steven G. Rogelberg.

   Rogelberg's book brings a research-based approach to meetings, with practical attention extending beyond the familiar instruction to prepare an agenda.

   Investigate it when you want to examine how the gathering works for its participants. Suppose the fictional repair team's review mixes routine information, a complicated staffing choice and a customer problem that only two people understand. Everybody attends the whole meeting, although their reasons for being there differ.

   The reading question concerns meeting design: which interaction is needed, who needs to participate and how the experience supports the intended work. This is the more direct choice for readers who want a researched discussion of meetings themselves, rather than a management story with meetings inside it.

   Bring one recurring meeting to the reading. Describe its intended result and what actually happens, including what participants must do afterward. That gives you something specific to compare with the author's account without assuming the fastest or shortest version must be the best.

3. Death by Meeting: examining meetings through a management story

   By Patrick Lencioni.

   Death by Meeting is presented as a leadership fable about the problems of bad meetings, followed by a practical meeting model.

   Choose it if you prefer to enter a management question through a story. Its fictional setting gives you a different way into the question from Rogelberg's research-centered treatment. You can examine the proposed approach while considering which difficulty in the story resembles one you recognize.

   This is particularly relevant when a group has come to treat its meeting frustration as inevitable. The reason to investigate the book is to reconsider that assumption and the choices behind it. A fable's resolution is part of an argument, however, rather than evidence that adopting its arrangements will produce the same result in your business.

   Compare the story and model with your actual reason for gathering. A useful meeting for resolving an operating issue may need a different conversation from one reconsidering the direction of the company.

Give the meeting a job before giving it a new format

Choose owner responsibility, meeting design or a story-based challenge to the current arrangement. After reading, return to one recurring gathering and ask what it now has a better chance of accomplishing.

The owner-update explanation follows the information and authority in a particular request. If your question is how people reach a judgment together, use the separate group-decision selection.