5 Meeting Types: Use These to Help Define the Right Meeting for Your Situation

We already know that meetings in general are sometimes a problem. Understanding the type of meeting you are going to conduct helps to plan out what will be covered and who needs to be there. That begins to ensure we have a purpose and the right people there to accomplish what needs to be accomplished. Steve Jobs was famous for ensuring that only the people who should be there, were. He went to the point of removing people from the meeting he didn’t feel needed to be involved for that particular discussion.

Defining the purpose of your meeting is the top priority. If there is not a clear purpose for the meeting, then it should not occur. This is a good exercise to begin practicing for any meetings you schedule, and then challenge others who put meetings on your calendar. Some of those regular, recurring meetings should be fairly simple to define; for example, a weekly district call with all of your managers likely makes sense for the purpose. But taking some time to ensure you know what you and your team should get from it can better define how you build your agenda each week.

Before we look at some common types of meetings (and I believe almost any meeting can fall into these buckets), I found some interesting things while doing research for this article. Perhaps most noticeable was the range of meeting types people listed. You can find many articles on meeting types, but they range from about 5 types of meetings up to 16. That is nuts, and further illustrates the problems that come from a culture of too many meetings. When you look at the list below, they are broad enough to fit almost anything that would require a group of people to come together and work collaboratively, whether in a large group or regular one-on-one status type meetings.

Informational

The informational meeting is about exactly what it says, sharing information. These could be kickoff meetings to introduce a new project, initiative, or process. These could also include a retrospective meeting, looking back on something just completed. Or it could be a town hall style meeting where leaders are providing updates on macro level issues for the company. These tend to be larger groups of people and the purpose is to provide information to many people. While the information shared here may be used for other types of meetings later, the informational meeting does not lead to immediate decisions or outcomes. It is for sharing purposes only.

Decision-Making

The decision-making meeting could also be considered a problem-solving meeting. Either way, the purpose of this type of meeting is to get the right people together to make a decision. That is the defined outcome. When complete, there should be a path forward on next steps, actions to be taken, and ownership assigned for those actions.

In the case of problem-solving, the actions may be to do additional research or information gathering to come back to making a final decision on the resolution, but this is still ultimately a decision that the team makes to take action on a problem that has been presented.

Status

Status meetings can be one on one or small group. It is similar to the information meeting, but with a more focused agenda on specific updates to smaller groups. In some ways, the status meeting can be a combination of all the types of meetings mentioned here. There will be some information sharing, some decision-making, some level of team building, and potentially a need for brainstorming ideas. This type of meeting is more driven by a smaller group that is driven specifically be a leader with direct reports or very close partners.

Team Building

These should be the fun meetings. Their design and purpose should be bringing the team together to focus less on work, and more on each other. They can be much more difficult to do virtually. But hosting a ‘happy hour’ call would be a great example of a team building meeting type. Getting together outside the work environment for a team dinner or fun activity are also examples of a team building meeting.

Brainstorming

The brainstorming meeting is about idea creation. These meetings may not, and likely should not, lead to final decisions. Decisions here may be for the purposes of narrowing down first, then deciding later. Gathering a group of diverse thinkers from different areas is a great plan for brainstorming meetings. Many of those members may not be the decisions makers for the problem you are trying to solve, but that doesn’t decrease the value of pulling specific people together to learn from them. The brainstorming meeting is often a precursor to the decision-making meeting.

When you think about meetings you are a part of, think about which of these types they fall into, and if the purpose was clearly defined for that session. If not, and you set it up, work on how you can improve that for the future. If you were not the meeting owner, work with that person to help them identify the correct meeting type and how they can better define why they are getting people in a room or on a call for discussion. That is valuable time and everyone wants to be able to contribute. However, we all deserve to have our time respected, so we can contribute in the right ways at the right time.

How can you better identify your meetings and clearly define their purpose for everyone involved?

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Photo by Benjamin Child on Unsplash