Article

Surviving group meetings

There will be a slacker, an overachiever and a person with a continuous conflicting schedule
Jennifer Ryan - Kansas State Collegian (Kansas State U.)

MANHATTAN, Kan. - Group projects. Two simple words that can make every college student groan in disgust.

About this time of year, the computer labs are filled with a group of students that is tense and huddled around a single monitor. We're there at all hours of the night and day trying to work together and accommodate everyone's schedule. We create e-mail listservs and phone trees so everyone will show up after changing the meeting 15 times.

We're there to earn a class grade, but we're also learning in the process -- learning about ourselves, about the subject and how to handle all kinds of people.

Whatever way your group was formed, the process is like playing Russian Roulette -- nobody knows exactly what he or she is going to get.

However, a few assumptions can be made: There will be a slacker, an overachiever and a person with a continuous conflicting schedule.

A company that specializes in team unity and effectiveness, Team Management Systems, has a few technical terms for these folks: reporter-advisers, creator-innovators, explorer-promoters, assessor-developers, thruster-organizers, concluder-producers, controller-inspectors and upholder-maintainers.

The April 1996 issue of Fast Company magazine offers a few tips college students can use to cut down on group meeting time and the frustrations that follow.

-- Take meetings seriously.

-- Meetings generally last too long. They should accomplish twice as much in half the time. Almost every guru invokes the same rule: Meetings should last no longer than 90 minutes.

-- Don't let people wander off the topic. It's the starting point for all advice on productive meetings: Stick to the agenda. But, it's hard to stick to an agenda that doesn't exist, and most meetings in most companies are decidedly agenda-free.

-- Convert decisions at the meeting into action. People leave meetings with different views of what happened and what's supposed to happen next. The best way to avoid that misunderstanding is to convert from "meeting" to "doing" -- where the "doing" focuses on the creation of shared documents that lead to action.

-- Meetings are always missing important information, so they postpone critical decisions. Bring the necessary information to the meeting.

-- Monitor what works and what doesn't, and hold people accountable.

Businesses Fast Company and Team Management Systems such as these lead me to believe our frustrations with group projects aren't going to end after we graduate.

Apparently, all that mumbo-jumbo about having to work with other people after college is true.

These ideas might work in your next group, but nothing replaces the ultimate motivation -- money. We're not getting paid for the hours we spend on a project. But if we did, the teamwork might not seem so painful.