This meeting could have been an email.
How many times have you said this?
How many times have you heard this?
Within higher education, we’re notorious for having standing meetings that are often longer than they need to be, knowing that the information could have been communicated via email. Amidst the chaos that was my day-to-day of being a hall director, there were too many times where I wished a department meeting could have been an email. Between trying to track down students of concern and follow-up with them, ensuring I was meeting with student staff members and following up as a supervisor, keeping up with committee work and projects, and helping plan robust student programming – and the list goes on – I often left meetings wishing I could have those precious two hours back in my day because the meeting could have been an email. Which leads me to wonder – how do you cultivate a meeting that couldn’t have been an email? And, for professional development, how do you influence the agenda for a meeting you don’t set?
I’ve learned that meetings that couldn’t have been emails often have three things in common: Connection, insight, and learning. There will inevitably be times when you must go over dense material, like when you’re approaching the closure of buildings, and everyone needs to be on the same page. Other times, you can use your meetings for community-building, input and feedback, discussion, and professional development. When cultivating agendas at a departmental level, I have found that when you use the time for anything other than the above, department meetings become about reporting of information from a top-down perspective and the feeling that this meeting could have been an email. So, how do you flip the antiquated script that we often write?
Practical Applications and Ideas
LEARNING: Is there a topic you or your team needs more training on? Or, is there something you wish you had more time to cover in training, but didn’t? Invite a campus partner into your meeting to do an abbreviated professional development session.
LEARNING: Is there an area of residence life or housing that a member of your team is really gifted in? Ask them to present or lead a roundtable discussion about it to share knowledge.
INSIGHT: Do you have a recruitment, training, or major departmental process that needs to be overhauled? Use part of your departmental meeting to generate new ideas.
INSIGHT: Did you just finish a process, or is there an initiative coming down the pipeline that would benefit from input and feedback? Build time and questions into your agenda for a listening session.
CONNECTION: Feeling disconnected from students and student staff, or your professional staff team? Spend part of your meeting doing a community report where people talk about something they are prod of, something that has been challenging, and something they’re currently working on that most other people wouldn’t know about.
Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about things that an email can’t do as effectively as meeting in person, and I keep coming back to this idea of sharing the agenda. As a leader, I’ve been thinking of ways that I can take up less space and allow my team to take up more. This means spending most of our department meetings asking them to report about community updates and trends that they are seeking to troubleshoot, and it also means intentionally bringing topics for discussion to our space for them to provide input. It means empowering hall directors to lead discussions relevant to departmental processes, giving them a sense of ownership and agency. Sometimes, it means using our department meeting for pop-up professional development – on your campus, who can you invite into a department meeting to connect with your team to encourage collaboration and a collective understanding of our work? Most notably, sometimes it means physically flipping the cadence of the agenda so that mine – and the rest of the leadership team’s announcements – are discussed last.
It can be painful to sit through a meeting that could have been an email, and those experiences are often followed by a barrage of side conversations, Slack, or Teams threads as a result of frustration from a meeting that could have been an email – “the meeting after the meeting,” so to speak. How do we move these side conversations into main meeting spaces so that less “meetings after the meeting” occur? What happens when you’re part of a meeting that you don’t set the agenda for? How do you influence a meeting you don’t set the tone for? This is often a harder part to play, requires some planning, and vulnerability.
I believe that if you ask any individual in leadership what makes professionals stand out, they will share something to the effect of, “team members who come to me with questions and ideas.” If you find yourself in a place where you attend too many department meetings that could have been emails, consider:
- Can I offer feedback to the meeting organizer about how this meeting could be more collaborative?
- Conversely, is there an idea that I have for discussion or professional development that might be beneficial for this group, and if so, am I willing to do the legwork to make it happen?
- Or, if a colleague says something thought provoking, consider saying, “I’d love it if we could discuss this more as a group.”
- Is there a departmental process that needs improvement that needs all of us at the table to troubleshoot, plan, and generate?
Authentic leaders are often thirsty to share the agenda and often struggle with how to do so effectively. In one-on-one settings, bring forward your ideas for discussion – they could end up being the reason your meeting couldn’t have been an email.
For further reading and more ideas, check out “Death by Meeting” by Patrick Lencioni.
