The writer is author of ‘How to Be a Better Leader’ and is a visiting professor at Bayes Business School, City, University of London

We must stop meeting like this. By “this” I mean the catalogue of irritations which are all too familiar from working life: overlong, overcrowded, hijacked, unproductive meetings. No wonder some businesses, such as the Canadian ecommerce platform Shopify, have seized the opportunity to eradicate most meetings from colleagues’ diaries.

A tougher minded approach to meetings may become a lasting benefit of the pandemic, which has forced managers to think about how and where people work best. At the recent Global Peter Drucker Forum in Vienna I asked Roger Martin, former dean of the Rotman school of management in Toronto, for his take.

“I guess we need to get together only when we need to do something generative in the moment,” he told me. “In the pre-Covid world we got together for way too many things. We got together for me to broadcast something to you.

“The best response post-Covid is to recognise that you’re going to have to carefully curate physical meetings,” he added. “If you want people to show up, to travel in, it’s got to be obvious in the meeting that we needed to be here together to generate something special. And if at the end of the meeting they say ‘I didn’t really need to be here’, they won’t come the next time.”

Martin argues that leaders have to develop a new skill: how to curate an experience. “There has to be a purpose for every person who’s invited to the meeting,” he says. “If you invite somebody to a meeting to listen . . . no, not going to work. Invite only people you have a role for.”

This is a more tactfully worded version of Elon Musk’s observation that “It is not rude to leave [a meeting], it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time.” There is also an echo of the late management guru Drucker’s droll criticism that “one either meets or one works”.

Clearly Zoom and Teams have made it possible to have effective meetings without forcing people to travel. This newish technology has revivified the dire (audio) conference call. It has been bad news for the business travel industry but good news for families and the planet.

But maybe we should be careful not to overlook the less obvious or immediately tangible benefits of in-person meetings. In a recent talk at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London, the organisational anthropologist John Curran argued that, in terms of corporate culture (and the healthy development of that culture), there may be a lot more going on in the meeting room than participants realise.

Curran described attending a series of meetings (as an observer) of an international medical devices company. In one crucial meeting the chief executive was present, along with the heads of HR, sales, and marketing, and a couple more team members.

To an alert anthropologist, with an understanding of group dynamics, what played out was striking. There were “rituals” of behaviour and language, which revealed underlying tensions and which were designed to maintain rather than break down barriers between colleagues. There were “avoidance techniques”. There were “fight/flight” responses, with marketing and sales executives failing to engage or understand each other. There were “artefacts” — flip charts, Sharpies, Post-it notes — and the use of furniture and technology (iPads) which put more distance between colleagues.

In other words, even in the supposedly formal, professional and adult setting of a meeting, Curran says, you can find “ritual performances that are used to either meet the goals of the meeting, or disrupt the goals in order to preserve an individual’s or subgroup’s identity against change or power and authority”. And if that sounds like some of the worst meetings you have had to sit through, now you know what was really going on.

More positively, this suggests that with sensitivity and planning constructive meetings can be held which take account of the different roles people might be playing. At the very least, some of the classic pitfalls could be avoided.

We will always have meetings. We should try to make the most of them. That will mean taking a more thoughtful approach. “Invest more prep time,” Martin says. “Know what you are trying to create. And then the meetings where you are together physically, they are going to be really high value-added meetings, way higher value-added than they were before.”

This will not be easy. As Cal Newport, professor in computer science at Georgetown University, told the New York Times recently: “History tells us that it will probably take a generation to figure out what the best kind of collaborative cognitive work looks like when we have external computational aids connected by high-speed digital networks. It’s going to take a while.”

This is the post-Covid challenge, and opportunity. With luck we could achieve the best possible outcome: a meeting of minds.

Letter in response to this article:

Try starting meetings with a prayer — I recommend it / From Jo Jacobius, London N6, UK