Many of us who work in libraries have walked out of a conference room or closed a virtual meeting and made the joke, either to ourselves or to a colleague, that meeting could’ve been an email.
Up to a point, it’s a throwaway line that is meant to blow off some steam after a meeting where everyone gave up an hour of their day without understanding why and without anything useful being accomplished. But there is something underneath that line, which is the idea that the organization is disrespecting us.
It’s my belief that people have a limited supply of time, attention, and energy to devote to work. If you’re working in a library, the parceling out of this supply might look like what you have to give to your specific job tasks, the cross-unit teams you collaborate with for projects, service to your institution, and service to the profession. And it can feel disrespectful to have given up some of your supply of time, attention, or energy to a poorly run meeting.
Poorly run meetings can be agenda-less meetings, where people come together and don’t know what they’re in the room to talk about or decide. Poorly run meetings can be meetings where a single person dominates the conversation because, as a facilitator, it can be awkward to ask someone to pause and make space for others to contribute. Poorly run meetings can be meetings where only half of the agenda is covered because the first item took up most of the meeting time. Poorly run meetings can be meetings where no one is certain about what the action items are and who is responsible for them, so decisions made during the meeting are never acted upon.
As someone in a library who has formal leadership responsibilities, it should matter to you if the people in your library feel disrespected by the meeting culture. You almost certainly attend every meeting in your organization, let alone lead every meeting in your organization. But as the leaders, the organization’s culture starts with you. You set the tone.
Meetings are probably the least interesting thing that happens in your library, so you may never have considered whether your library has a culture of poorly run meetings. But I guarantee that the people who work in your library have given it a lot of thought. In libraries, and especially in academic libraries, meetings are the mechanism for moving forward much of the work your library does. Meetings are where information gets shared and where decisions get made. Meetings are where workflows are developed and policies are agreed upon. And if your library has a culture of poorly run meetings, the work that moves the library forward becomes slow and stagnated. Decisions don’t get made in a timely manner. And when they do, they don’t get acted upon. Innovation gets stifled when the loudest voices in the room overpower the best ideas. And the longer this culture festers, the more likely it is that the workers in your library will disengage in an effort to protect their limited time, attention, and energy.
People who work in a library with a culture of poorly run meetings sometimes suggest that the solution to having too many poorly run meetings is to have fewer meetings overall. I am sympathetic to this idea. But I would champion it not as a solution to the culture of poorly run meetings, but, rather, as part of a consideration of which committees and groups within a library need to be sunsetted after having served their purpose.
For now, I would like to suggest that turning a library’s meeting culture from poorly run meetings to well run meetings starts with leaders thinking more about meetings and about how meetings move forward (or don’t) the work of the library. I think that library leaders can, and should, model good meeting culture in the meetings they convene. But I also think that anyone in a library who runs a meeting can be the change they want to see in the library by thinking more about the meetings they convene. I have some suggestions that I’ll get to over the new few posts that I think will help. But setting the tone comes from the top. So it should matter to you, as someone in a library with formal leadership responsibilities, if people are regularly making the this meeting could have been an email joke about the meetings in your library. Because, at some point, a joke isn’t just a joke anymore. It’s revealing an uncomfortable truth that everybody knows but nobody wants to talk about.
I offered some examples of what poorly run meetings can look like, so I’ll also offer some examples of well-run meetings. Well run meetings start with a purpose, before the agenda is even constructed. Well-run meetings have agendas that are shared ahead of the meeting, along with any documents that a meeting attendee would be required to discuss. Well-run meetings include agendas with a reasonable number of agenda items, including the amount of time that the convener has allotted to each item. Well-run meetings have conveners who make space for every person to contribute to the conversation. Well-run meetings have detailed minutes that include action items, and those minutes are shared with meeting attendees and archived in the organization’s intranet. And well-run meetings include a conversation at each meeting about the status of the previous meeting’s action items.
Building better libraries starts by considering every aspect of the organizational culture, and one of those aspects is meeting culture. Let’s build better libraries by building better meetings!
