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Constantly getting caught up in them can stop you from doing your job. They should be short, sweet and highly focused - and convened only when face-to-face contact is demanded, says Andrew Saunders. But are conferencing alternatives with a human touch any substitute?
A former MT staffer had the good fortune a few years ago to interview the late Lord Weinstock, managing director of GEC across three glorious decades and, even in the autumn of his life, a forthright and formidable personality. Deadlines being tight, the hack hardly expected to be granted an audience with the great man, a legend in his own lifetime and at that moment probably the last surviving old-school industrial tycoon left in the country. So our man was much surprised when his offer to conduct the proceedings on the phone was swiftly rejected. 'No, boy,' intoned Weinstock, whose company's turbines powered the National Grid and whose electronics kept RAF fighters locked on target 'You had better come and see me. I want to look you in the eye.'
The wily Weinstock had a point As every aspiring boss who likes to keep their interpersonal skills well-honed knows, 75%yo of communication is non-verbal. What you do and how you behave in a meeting are at least as important as what you say. And when it comes to weighing someone up before deciding whether or not you can do business together, there's no substitute for fleshtime.
'We are an evolved species and we are designed for faceto-face communications. It's the only form of interaction that is instinctive; all the other media are learned.' says Nigel Nicholson, professor of organisational behaviour at London Business School.
But does that mean that you should insist on having every meeting in person? Ask the bleary-eyed members of the sales team this question as they struggle, catatonic, through the weekly lam Monday team-building session and the answer is unlikely to be in the affirmative.
Unless you are self-employed, work for a very small business or have an exceptionally high boredom threshold, the chances are that you spend more time sitting in meetings than you want to. A recent survey by 3M suggests that managers spend as much as a day and a half every week locked...