To some people, twice a week may seem like an excessive amount to hold department meetings. But as a communications professional, my team serves as the face of the organization in many ways, working on fundraising, marketing, and social media. And that’s a lot of things to keep track of, so much it’s hard to condense into one-hour meetings each week. As a result, we go over projects on Mondays and Thursdays, with social media and fund development the focus on Monday and other outreach on Thursday. While not a fan of meetings in general, I do enjoy the opportunity to tackle the objectives for our department and I try to have a little fun, too. Today, of course, we talked a little about the first Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl victory in 50 years. How could I not as a Chiefs fan?
Even with such asides, we get a lot accomplished in this scheduled time, a lot more than other meetings I’ve been part of. The biggest culprit in the past has been waffling on certain decisions. Either several people needed to have input on a matter or there was nitpicking on content, layout, even the type of font we used. This led to spinning our wheels and ultimately a delay in completing projects, a very frustrating process to say the least.
With the method that my current team has in place, we’re able to look more at the bigger picture of creating the right message to convey how we help our community. We still pay attention to detail and want to present a quality product, and effective meetings allow us to do that. Lussier & Achua (2016) indicate that laying out objectives, breaking out topics to be covered, then going back to discuss action items are the three components that make a meeting most successful. I feel like we accomplish this in each meeting and have a sense of direction for what our department should be working on before the next one.
Technology plays a major role in moving our meetings along. We have a monitor in the conference room and so we’re able to see things on the screen and make adjustments as we notice something. This saves us a great deal of time, not to mention sheets of paper that we’re not having to print.
For me, the department meeting really is a chance to give my input on things and help improve upon our processes to do great things for the organization.
Reference
Lussier, R.N., & Achua, C.F. (2016). Leadership: Theory, application, & skill development (6th ed.). Boston, MA: Cengage Learning.