Thoughts on email and status meetings
For the record: I have nothing against meetings. There is something about face-to-face communication that can’t be replicated in any medium. The two-way real-time exchange of ideas and perspectives can be invigorating.
Something that is NOT communication is a group of people sitting in a room with people taking turns providing status of the individual areas for which they’re responsible. The serialized monologue has a name and it is a broadcasting. While sometimes appropriate in person, it’s almost never appropriate as a weekly event. Email can be great for status, more on that in a bit.
Also, meetings have a cost; several people in a room, ostensibly unplugged from the world so that they can pay attention, means that there’s a definite opportunity cost and lots of other things are not being accomplished while we’re all together. So any face to face communication needs to have a well understood purpose if it’s to be an efficient and effective use of everyone’s time.
Back to email: it’s a wonderful broadcast medium. Anyone can drop one to the right audience, hopefully after collecting their thoughts into a coherent message. It also is helpful that I can get caught up on status from those who share on my own schedule.
Email is not well suited to discussions, however. Picking up the phone or walking over to a colleague for a brief hallway discussion avoids misinterpretation and provides immediate results. “But what about a record of what was said? Email is the tool I use to hold people accountable!” That’s fine; followup your discussions with a short summary to your colleague and copy whomever else is appropriate (note that defining appropriate is an exercise left to the reader). That’s a good idea to do anyway, as it gives you both an opportunity to sanity check what you met about.
So to sum up: Email: great for status broadcast, not great for discussion.
Meetings: great for discussions, not great for status broadcast.
