Better by design: Making meetings more productive

Abstract

All libraries have meetings, but not all meetings are productive. Unproductive meetings are viewed as a waste of time, resulting in low morale and lack of progress on organizational goals. But meetings are crucial to setting goals, formulating policies, removing barriers, and completing projects. Since meetings are a necessity, how can we make them better?

I am the library director at a regional comprehensive public university, and I recently completed a Master of Business Administration degree with a concentration in Human Resources. One of the management courses I took covered the topic of meetings, including reading the book Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable…about Solving the Most Painful Problems in Business by Patrick Lencioni. Given the importance of meetings – and their well-known challenges—the knowledge gained in this course inspired me to reconfigure my library’s meeting structure.