Teamwork and running meetings

Tareq al-Suwaidan distils the good work team into seven criteria, the first being the choice of a leader — a boat with more than one head sinks — and the leader actually leads, not merely in name: he distributes tasks and roles, gives instructions and help, and makes sure the group moves towards the goal ^{1 2}.

Second is planning before work: fixing the goal and the way to reach it; third is participation — the leader makes sure no one is marginalised — fourth is motivation, 'for it stirs resolve'; fifth is distributing roles — a table, for instance, is received by one person and checked by another; sixth is managing the discussion, which includes protecting the weak from those who monopolise speech; and seventh is managing information ^{2 3 4 5}.

In managing information he divides it into three: direct information, which is recorded, used and never reread; irrelevant information, which is struck out at once — in meetings it arrives as talk, and the chair must deflect it as 'not related, we defer it' — and indirect information, on which most of the time should be spent because linking it yields the conclusions ^{5 6 7 8}.

He also teaches the tricks of running and of wrecking meetings, so that the chair knows them and can control them: reading body language in meetings; ways of 'demolishing' a meeting such as provoking a particular person with a bad example about him ('I am watching out for you') or raising an unrelated dispute; and he tells how he handled an aggrieved man in a meeting he chaired by entering 'Bassam's reply to so-and-so' as an agenda item — preserving his right and the meeting together ^{9 10 11 12}. The ordinary meeting method — agenda, approving the previous minutes, discussing the items, minutes — prevails and wastes time; he cites a Saudi study that a general manager or above attends on average a hundred and ninety-nine meetings a year (needs_source) — and the effective alternative he teaches is The nominal group technique ^{13 14 15}.