My negative experience in a particular meeting - Patrick St-Pierre

When you ask me to think about my worst experience of a meeting, one meeting come directly to my minds. In one of my precedent working experiences, I was working in the accountability team of an important governmental research. The research was very long and we didn’t have a lot of meetings. With our manager, we were 5 in the team. So, once, we had an important meeting and it was at the half of the project. It was supposed to be an important meeting, because we needed to plan the rest of the project and to solve some important problems that we faced for obtaining some needed information.

To start, the meeting was really not prepared. The date was set not enough time before the meeting and an important member of the team was not able to be present at the meeting. He tried to change his schedule to be there, but, with the short time, he didn’t succeed. Otherwise, for that kind of meeting, all the members are important because all of them bring an important knowledge and skills luggage. This lack affected the quality of the meeting because the brainstorming that we had was poor in ideas and the ideas were not really diverse. At the end, the process of decision making went in the same way of the brainstorming and we can felt that the solutions that we found was not really “deepen” solutions about the problems. On my point of view, the manager of the project should have moved the meeting at another time when everybody in the team could be present.

Also, even if the purpose of the meeting seemed clear, the development of it was a little confusing. Indeed, half of the members of the team was not enough prepared for the meeting and it was hard to follow the process of it. So, on my point of view, there was a big lack in the planning of the meeting. There were no agenda prepared and we moved from one subject to another all the time. Sometime, it was difficult to differentiate the most important subjects from the less ones. At the end of the meeting, even if we met the goals of the meeting, I felt like it could have been more productive and shorter. An agenda of the meeting should have been done before and distribute to the members of the team.

To finish, at the time of the meeting, almost all the members of the team were demotivated because the project didn’t go as well as we planned and the information that with received for the work was not really like we expected it. I think that we all needed to be motivated by our manager in the meeting, but I don’t think he really felt our demotivation. If we do a parallel with that situation and the notion of flow, we could say that the challenges that we faced were higher than the skills and the element that we had at that moment. If the manager was more receptive to that, he could have helped his project team and obtain better results. 

Patrick St-Pierre