Saturday of this week saw the 1 year anniversary of my arrival in Bangladesh. Exactly 12 months ago to that day I stepped off a BA flight into the heat and humidity of an October morning in Dhaka. Since then I've been slowly but surely trying to help BRIF to become a more effective organisation. Most of what I'm working on is still ongoing and due in December, with the strategic plan being a good example, but that Saturday I actually saw some work payoff handsomely before my own eyes.

By way of some background I should mention that, every first Saturday of the month, BRIF's project and senior managers get together for what they call a coordination meeting. It's their only opportunity to meet all together to share their successes and discuss any issues they have. I think I attended my first one of these in December last year, and found it be one of the worst meetings I'd ever seen. Granted I was comparing it with what I'd seen working in the private sector in Western Europe, but still!

To start with the agenda is not set in advance. I don't mean that they cobbled together something just before the meeting started, as I'm sure we've all attended meetings like that. No, here I mean that the first 20-30 minutes were spent with someone at the whiteboard writing down the issues shouted out by the different attendees depending on what they wanted to discuss. This almost always took place without Habib i.e. the Executive Director, so given that pretty much all the points were directed at him he had zero time to prepare. As for the points put on the "agenda", they were by and large extremely trivial and concerned the tiny administrative details of a single project. In other words, they were of absolutely no interest to anyone else and frankly, once the meeting got underway, it showed.

So the meetings got off to a flying start, and then gently accelerated into a wall of boredom as we reviewed the minutes WORD BY WORD. I kid you not, someone would read them out, all of them, and we'd rehash the entire discussion of the previous month. I was mind numbingly pointless and inefficient. Next was the way these meetings were managed. Not well. There seemed to be a distinct lack of leadership with no clear chairperson to manage time and keep discussions to the "agenda". So now were losing time talking about things that aren't strictly relevant (though given the way the agenda's set you might think the discussion could just as well wander onto something useful...). The whole time of course the discussions rarely interest more than 2-3 people, so the general feeling of the meeting being a waste of time is further compounded. This makes people reluctant to come back after breaks, hence losing even more time!

The final nail in the coffin came when I sat down to define what a monthly management meeting should be about in the first place i.e. team building, performance analysis and planning. If it's not already painfully clear, our meetings did absolutely nothing for any of these, least of all team building. At no point did the project managers report back on the last month's progress and activities, sharing success stories and offering problems encountered up for discussion. This of course was what Habib was really after to better understand and direct operations, so he too was frustrated by the way the meeting failed to address his needs.

Sooo, what did we do? Well, I asked Anne to devise a checklist with which we could analyse the next meeting and start to identify and quantify the really big problems. She did a grand job, and as I was in Dhaka for the next meeting, she herself used the questions etc. and gave us all a much clearer picture of what was going on. To this we added a quick analysis of the meeting minutes for this year to see what was being documented, and especially whether the decisions and actions were clear with owners and deadlines. I should mention at this point that the meeting Anne analysed saw the introduction of project performance feedback. Oh yes, under the tuition of our Monitoring and Evaluation Coordinator (coached by yours truly), we'd asked the project managers to tell us about their projects and how things were going. They tried their best, and some did better than others, but seeing experienced managers reading from shabby pieces of paper can't have been a barrel of laughs for anyone present.

When Anne and I looked at what the meeting had covered, not covered, the time taken and the general atmosphere, we found that we could trim over 3 hours. 3 HOURS! That's a staggering amount of time to waste in a single meeting! While we were going through this Habib wandered in, so when he asked what we were up to we debriefed him on Anne's findings and what we could change. The key point as far as I was concerned was getting him to retake control of the meetings by actively chairing them and challenging the project managers to deliver the information we needed in a concise and effective manner (we'll need presentation skills training for the latter, and it's on my to-do list). He seemed a little reluctant to buy into this, even asking me to move on to another conclusion, so I got a bit angry with impress upon him the importance, as I saw it, of this change. And we basically left it at that until the next meeting.

I came back from Dhaka to be there, at considerable personal expense as weekends are precious and Sarah and I get very little time to ourselves at the best of times. So both Anne and I were there. When we walked in we could see that Habib had positioned himself front and centre with a pen and a notebook - he was clearly in charge and going to lead things. Victory number 1. Then, before we got into the excruciating exercise of defining the agenda, he asked Anne and I to feedback on the analysis we'd done of the last meeting! Not quite believing our luck I got to my feet and quickly shared where we'd lost 3 hours during the previous meeting, including the farce about the agenda. To illustrate my point I wrote on the board an example of a standard, never to be changed, possibly ever, agenda with suggested durations for each point. It was accepted there and then. Victory number 2.

That however all paled into insignificance compared to the way Habib totally changed his approach and chaired the meeting quite beautifully. He was clearly uncomfortable to begin with (which he later admitted was due to eating too much beef at a wake the day before), but after the morning tea break he settled down a bit and managed to generate an atmosphere that was open and friendly while remaining fundamentally professional. The effect was striking, as his mood and approach immediately affected all the other managers as they followed suit. I couldn't have asked for a better illustration of how a manager's mood and attitude can dictate the behaviour of subordinates. During the first half of the meeting I occasionally whispered bits of advice to him, about relaxing a little more and giving positive feedback after each project presentation (another cultural issue that we're working on), but after that it went like clockwork. The change in Habib's attitude and how well it paid off was really the main victory of the day.

It all happened so quickly and in an unexpected manner that it didn't really sink in fully until the evening. I now have to hope that this wasn't just a flash in the pan, and help Habib et al to stay on the same track for the months to come. I'm quietly confident though as I didn't need to do anything once I'd finished my feedback - the managers adopted the agenda and even stopped someone straying from the current point when that seemed likely! There was also a positive feeling at the end of the meeting, as if everyone had got something out of it. Anne suggested that now that they've seen how a good meeting can work they'll take it for themselves and wonder why they didn't do things this way before, as if all they needed was to see something better to realise where to go. That rings true with me, so I'm crossing my fingers for next month.