I recently decided against scheduling a two-hour meeting for my department. People hate long meetings don’t they? Even when you provide the coffee and fruit.

Instead of the hoary old around-the-table format, I told the team that I would hold a ‘surgery’. I have no idea if this is an example of recognised managerial practice: it just struck me as a good idea at the time.

At a typical meeting, all of our team members would usually attend simultaneously. The idea, of course, is to maximise communication between team members and to ensure that we’re all singing from the same hymn sheet. It’s a good intention. The de facto result, however, is that people get bored after twenty minutes, drift off, make doodles and become increasingly anxious about the slippage of their projects out in the real world.

At the surgery, however, the only individual who needs to be present throughout is the chairperson. The other attendees can drift in and out and make their contributions on an individual basis.

I told the team by email that I’d be in the meeting room between 2 and 4pm and that they would be able to drop in and see me at some point between those hours.

It was very successful. Everyone I wanted to speak to came along on their own volition and I think they were grateful that they only had to gawp at my wobbly face for fifteen to twenty minutes each instead of two achingly long hours.

The main benefits of the surgery format, as we found them, were as follows:

• Smaller investment of time per person
• The time spent with each attendee could focus upon their individual achievements, plans and concerns rather than those of other people
• The less formal structure seemed to elicit more candid information than in a traditional full-team meeting
• We avoided the curse of Groupthink

I’m sure there must be disadvantages to this format too. There must be circumstances were the whole team needs to be present – i.e. when the information needs to be ‘broadcast’ by one individual and received identically by a large number of people – but for this scenario – where the information was ‘broadcast’ instead by attendees and received by the chair – the surgery was perfect.