Learning Meeting Management in Africa

July 30, 2012

Given that I spent the last two years a slave to my Outlook calendar, moving from class to meeting to meeting when my phone chimed to remind me of the appropriate time, it is ironic that it is in Africa that I am finding the opportunity to practice better meeting management. Many of those meetings I simply attended, and now leading a team of women through a rigorous, challenging process, I am gaining greater appreciation for the fine art of managing meeting time. Here are my most important takeaways:

"Respect the time." This is one of the most obvious cultural differences here. We Americans are obsessed with timeliness, and some of my team members do not have watches or phones. Having a meeting at 2:00 does not mean plus or minus an hour as the sun dictates, and it has been difficult knowing how strictly to enforce this. Our meetings are hugely more productive when we start and end together. Setting this standard is working, and yesterday a teammate even showed up a few minutes early and announced, "I learned, I respect the time."

Arrange the room carefully. We often meet in the local community government office, which doubles as a tailoring school. Furniture is limited, and it is sometimes a challenge to find enough chairs for the whole team. In early meetings, I often just sat on the edge of the table or stood in front of the group, thinking that reserving chairs for the team was the polite thing to do. After a few days however, I realized that the group was treating me like the teacher at the front of the room, waiting for my guidance or approval in their ever move. Since then I have made a more concerted effort to arrange the chairs in a circle with Gilbert and I mixed in the group whenever possible, and I feel like we are on more equal footing.

Have an agenda. Never in my life have I spent so much time preparing for meetings. Each day I make an agenda and a list of goals before meeting Gilbert, my translator, and we then review both together and adjust accordingly. We convene again about an hour before the team arrives to practice. This probably means at least two hours of preparing for every hour that the team is actually together. I don't know how exactly to adapt this practice to real time constraints at home, but I do know that meetings are infinitely more efficient and effective when I have an agenda and know all of the tools I want to use to cover pertinent information long before the real meeting time.

Share the pen. Gilbert and I prepare posters and headings before meetings to speed things up, and I often add things to our lists as we go. In talking to other scholars about their groups, I realized that I had developed an unintentional monopoly of the Sharpie. Since then I have been experimenting with passing the pen to different teammates at various points in the conversation to draw out their individual voices, and I like the results. Sharing the responsibility of writing seems to shift leadership roles throughout the meeting by putting different people in the driver's seat. It is my hope that cumulatively this will help my teammates to have greater ownership of the team and our project.

Vote. We have made a series of important decisions as a group in the last fee weeks, and I have used a voting process to do so many times. Sometimes I simply poll the group for quick results, but when I suspect that my members, many of whom are good friends, might be swayed by the opinions of their neighbors, I have used a secret ballot process instead. This accomplishes a few things. First, it gives members a few minutes to collect their thoughts before having to respond, and second, it allows everyone, even the quieter members, to have their opinions counted with equal weight.

Turn off the phone (and computer, iPad, or anything else electronic that you might be tempte to look at during a meeting). This weekend we had a scholar retreat (somewhere with, yes, electricity and running water), and in a group brainstorming session, I found myself reaching for my laptop to take some notes on my own project. In that moment, I happened to notice how carefully the entire group was listening. I set the computer back down and pledged to stay engaged in the conversation. I know you will say you can multi-task (and so do I), but I promise we can't. Just don't do it (I give you permission to remind me that I wrote this in a few weeks).

I have been lucky here to have the luxury of time to use each of these techniques, but I will be continuing to practice what I learned about meeting management in Africa when I return home and start a new job in a few short weeks.