There are different type of business meetings

People love to hate on meetings, especially in the business world. And most especially those droning status meetings that just seem designed to take me out of my individual contributor “flow.” But not all meetings fall into this category — if I’m a sales person, for example, I really don’t hate meeting with a potential customer and talking through his or her problems and the solutions we offer. When the company is reviewing the strategic plan I find myself *very* interested and ready/willing/able to contribute.

So really, when we’re hating on meetings, we’re really hating on the wrong kind of meeting, held at the wrong time, with the wrong people, and the wrong approach. Or some combination of all that. Sometimes we hear this framed in the “maker/manager split view of the world.”

Elise recently tackled meeting classification on the Lucid Meetings blog with her post “The 16 Types of Business Meetings.” It’s a lengthy article that takes the reader on a deep dive into the world of meetings by type: the who, what, when, why, etc. If you’re interested in a deep, meaty discussion about the impact of meetings on teams, projects, and organizations I encourage you to take a read here: http://blog.lucidmeetings.com/blog/16-types-of-business-meetings.

For a short capsule summary, here is her proposed meeting taxonomy in a handy chart.

There’s a lot of information encoded in this chart and it’s worth taking a scan through the accompanying article to get the significance of the various rows, columns, and groupings. Elise has written quite a bit on the subject of meetings over the past couple of years, but I think this classification work is really getting down to the truth about why some meetings work — but not always, and not always in the way one might hope. It’s a good foundation for rethinking the role of meetings in a given context.