Two and a Half Cheers for Meetings
Meetings are often essential. But leaders need to bear in mind that they come at a different cost for different people who attend them.
This is another installment in my ongoing series of "Two and a Half Cheers" posts, in which I discuss something that I feel deserves more general respect in our profession – even while recognizing and acknowledging that people may have good reasons for denigrating it.
Today's topic is meetings.
I've come to believe that one of the many ways people in the library profession can be sorted into two broad categories is on the dimension of affection for meetings. To put it more reductively, I think there are two kinds of librarians: those who love meetings, and those who hate them.
Personally, I really used to hate them. I generally felt like meetings were a distraction from my real work, and kind of resented being required to sit through what were often repetitive and circular discussions of issues that didn't even have much to do with me.