Scan reading

II. Read the following text through quickly to find the answers to the following questions. Remember you do not need to understand every word in order to answer the questions.

1. What is the text about?

2. Which is the best title for this text? Tick (v) the one you think is appropriate.

a) Reasons to hold a meeting.

b) Reasons not to hold a meeting.

c) The purpose of holding regular meetings’

d) Making meetings effective.

Title _________________________

Let’s think about some good reasons not to hold a meeting and get these out of the way, so that we look positively at good reasons to meet and how these reasons can be translated into productive effort.

Actually it doesn’t matter on which day of the week the meeting is held. The regular monthly, weekly or daily meeting suffers from the very reason it was initiated – its r egularity. The first time a team decides to meet regularly, there is relative enthusiasm. People see the point. It’s a chance to get together as a team, talk about things of mutual interest and share information which may be useful to others. It doesn’t take long for meeting to turn stale and for people to start attending out of a sense of duty or fear of reprisals. People go over the same old ground, jokes are repeated and the same people use it as a platform for their own intentions whether or not these are relevant to the subject of the meeting.

Regular meetings tend to reflect short-term thinking. The danger in focusing on the short-term is that you miss longer term trends and read too much i nto glitches or exceptional situations. It’s important, of course, to rectify immediate read problems, but it’s more important to assess how an organization is performing over a long period.

The sole purpose of the “ blame fest” seems to be to point fingers at any hint of underperformance. If you think in the short term, you’re more likely to find fault with individuals based on a single error or on a single week in which they appeared to underperform. The blame fest is a power play for the person who runs the meeting and is desperately embarrassing for participants who may wonder. “Will it be my turn this time? ” While teams often perform well for limited periods under pressure, they do not perform well out of fear, and blame fests simply make people frightened.

Perhaps meetings are not a great forum for information sharing. We have excellent electronic tools for just this. Often, organizations hold meetings to share information because they think their employees do not read important e-mailed information. If a piece of information is relevant to someone’s job and they either do not read or do not act on it, then that becomes a management issue rather than a reason to hold meetings.

One example of useful information-sharing software is Lotus Notes, which is designed to allow teams to share information using “databases” which are really information-sharing. In organizations where Notes is well used, teams are kept completely up to date on everything their members are doing. They do not need to meet to share this knowledge – they already have it, whether they are working in the same location or are geographically spread.

Exercise 1. Nowread the text carefully, Use a dictionary to find out the meaning of

. unknown words. Study the words, phrases and their definitions given

below.

1) to see the point - to understand the reason

2) mutual interest - belonging to two or more people, interest that two

. people both have

3) to share information - to exchange or discuss information

4) to turn stale - to be not new, original or interesting

5) fear of reprisal - the feeling of a fright to be punished for something you

have done

6)go over the same ground - talk about the same things again

7) to read much into glitches - to find an extra meaning in someone’s actions or

problems that is not obvious or does not exist

8)to rectify problems (formal) - to correct a problem, or mistake

9) the sole purpose - the only one

10) blame-fest - an occasion when people do a lot to blame people

instead of trying to solve a problem

11)underperform - to be less successful than people expect because of

doing a job not well enough

12) hint - suggestion