A long time ago when I was on the road as a sales executive, I worked for a company where the sales manager loved having what he called an 'emergency' business meeting.Sometimes he would call on a Friday afternoon telling me that I had to attend so to get to this crazy business meeting, I had to drive for over an hour just to get there. When I got there, more often than not his meeting agenda would be about stuff that could have waited till Monday morning or even a simple phone call would have done the trick. One time, all he wanted was to know what our sales figures for the day were so that he could report the figures to head office. What a waste of our time and money in gas for something so mundane.

I'm sure this has happened to most of us at one time or another or maybe even you as a manager are guilty of calling an unnecessary sales meeting from time to time. We have discussed on this site awhile ago how to conduct a successful sales meeting but in addition to that, it is also important to know when it is appropriate to call a business meeting. When an unscheduled meeting is called, it's usually about something that has a high priority and cannot wait until your regular scheduled meeting. Those types of situations should be fairly rare unless your company is going through some major upheaval. You have to consider that people are there to do a job and to be focused on what they're doing and if you are constantly calling meetings for trivial things, they will feel that their time is being wasted and they will feel devalued as a member of the team.

If you are going to call an unscheduled meeting, then there are a few things you need to consider before you call your team together. The first and foremost question you should ask yourself is, 'is this meeting really necessary'? I'm sure that if you really think about it, most unscheduled meetings are not. If a situation has arisen and you need to resolve it straight away, then the second question you should ask yourself is, 'do I need to call in the whole team or just certain individuals who can help me'? In most cases, you may only need a few people who have certain skills or that were involved in a particular situation. I can remember on a few occasions sitting at a team meeting listening to something that happened between two team members that had nothing to do with me and more to the point, was non of my business anyway. Those sort of things should be handled as a one on one instead of a group meeting.

So the next time something comes up and you need to resolve it urgently stop and think for a moment and ask yourself if an unscheduled team meeting is what needs to be done. Nobody likes to have their time wasted even though they would still be getting paid for it. It's a skillful leader who knows when to call a meeting and when one is not necessary and take some other action. Are you one of those managers or a manager that wastes the time of your team?