Career Executive

Meetings are part of the daily landscape of career executives. Some executives spend their entire days in meetings or on their way to them.

Managing a staff meeting is an art. There are a few keys to insuring that a meeting is managed in an effective and fruitful manner.

The first rule is to prepare in advance. Many executives neglect this essential part. One’s preparation determines in a large part the success or failure of the meeting. The first question that needs to be asked is the utility of the meeting and what one seeks to accomplish. Many issues can more easily be settled by a quick telephone call or by videoconference.

The second rule is to filter the attendees: who really needs to attend the meeting? Calling in more than those directly concerned wastes time and resources and dilutes the efficacy of the meeting.
The manager should inform attendees of the objectives of the meeting and they should as well prepare for it.

The person who has been designated by management to lead the meeting should really lead it, regardless of his level in the hierarchy. One should determine roughly the amount of time to be spent on each point and a person should be designated to take the notes and take care of the documentation.

Often an effective way to launch a meeting is by reminding the attendees in a few minutes of the decisions taken during previous meetings and the progress that remains to be made. This allows everyone to re-familiarize themselves with the meeting’s themes and goals.

Managers who arrive at meetings, starting them off with, ‘there’s a problem with X that I need to discuss with you all,’ – this meeting is already off to a bad start. A better strategy is to propose solutions or rather to suggest two or three explanations for the origin of the problems. This allows you to channel the discussion.

It is also important to remind participants of the goal of the meeting. This also allows you to channel the discussion. For example, you might remind the participants that the purpose of this meeting is to organize the migration of your old information systems to the new system. Failure to do so introduces the risk that the participants will question still again the need to migrate in the first place, a question which you have already largely debated and now decided upon.

To be effective in his meetings, a manager needs to listen to everyone. There’s no better way of insuring everyone’s complete attention than by announcing that participants will need to respond at the meeting’s end to a certain number of questions.

This is particularly useful when the conclusion of the meeting is to put in place an ongoing process, for example, to improve the quality of a reporting procedure. When everyone knows they will be asked what they understood and retained from the meeting, they will concentrate rather than acting like spectators listening over a cup of coffee.

By having participants reformulate what’s been said and decided, one insures that everyone is clear on the subjects treated and one everyone’s respective missions for follow-up. It is usually best to formulate questions to one’s staff in a positive manner, asking what they have understood rather than asking what they might have missed.

Another useful aid in advance the different participant’s temperaments. There may be the Enthusiast ready to jump into any new project, the Follower, the argumentative Contester. This last character is to be carefully managed because his natural reflex will be to neutralize as much as possible. Let this character express his contradictions because this serves a useful role: he pushes the others to argue. Convincing him is a sort of trial preceding the communication of your decision.

The executive should also be attentive to what each individual in his team says, to fight against the tendencies to monopolize the discussion.

Use of visual supports has become standard and presentation tools such as PowerPoint slides allow the distribution of the meetings results immediately. At the end of the meeting, everyone should know what he has to do. If, on the other hand, the meeting notes and documentation come 2 weeks later, the meeting’s thrust is lost.