Meetings

Talk about how you run meetings.

Answered by Brian Dunn, Best Buy

I lose interest quickly with the endless pontification. I like to use this phrase: "We have an 'apostle of the obvious' moment going on here." That drives me crazy. For the most part, I view meetings as a necessary evil, although I do enjoy our staff meetings when we get together and talk about where the business is and where we're going. I like those elements. But the endless meeting can get a little tedious for me, so I tend to want to get to the point.

This answer originally appeared in You Want Insights? Go to the Front Lines»

Anything different about the way you run meetings?

Answered by Shantanu Narayen, Adobe Systems

One of the ways I am trying to change my own management style is in the quarterly business reviews. I'm trying to focus more on getting people who are presenting to discuss their insights, and to lead the discussion of what they want to accomplish, and where the business is working, and where the business is not working, and what they are worried about -- as opposed to sharing reams and reams of data and then expecting us to make pronouncements about the right thing to do. Because, frankly, they're closer to the business. And the more you can get them to feel ownership for the decisions, I think the more successful you are. You certainly give them your input, you certainly coach and guide them, you channel them into areas that you believe they need to think about. But that's one way in which I'm trying to change as we grow this next generation of general managers. I want them to feel like the business review is their opportunity to talk about where the business is going well, where the business is not going as well, and what's keeping them up at night so that I can help them, as opposed to them feeling like they're under the microscope, and all they have to do is show you they're on top of the data, which I think is a meaningless exercise.

This answer originally appeared in Connecting the Dots Isn't Enough»

Let's talk about meetings. Is there anything unusual about the way you run them?

Answered by David C. Novak, Yum Brands

I hate Monday-morning quarterbacks. So I try to focus my meetings on building and sharing know-how that will help us win going forward. I focus my meetings on beating last year. Why is this program that you're talking about going to be better than what we did last year? What do we have in the pipeline that's going to keep us successful?' With every meeting I try to focus on what's the "so what" of what you just told me. And then, what's the "now what?" What are we going to do now so that we can get better results? I like to learn from what happened, but I want the focus of my meetings to be forward-looking. I'd much rather help people make sure they have a customer insight before we do a marketing program than wait until the marketing program's been done and then say, "We don't have a customer insight."

This answer originally appeared in At Yum Brands, Rewards for Good Work»

How do you run meetings?

Answered by Jacqueline Kosecoff, UnitedHealth Group

I don't lead meetings. To the extent that it's possible, I have others lead meetings. Every Friday, we have the senior leadership team come for about an hour-and-a-half operations check, and we have the checklist of items that we need to get to, and we will go through that list, but I will never lead that meeting. Each one of the executives leads the meeting -- it rotates in alphabetical order and we just go through the list. First of all, it teaches them how to lead a meeting. It also sends a message that this meeting's not for me, it's for us. And it's been my observation that at a lot of these operations meetings, everyone talks to the C.E.O., not to each other. It also teaches good meeting etiquette. People are much more, I think, respectful of how they behave in a meeting because they're going to be leading the meeting one day. We also begin every meeting by asking who needs to be acknowledged in the firm. Who in the company did something that's extraordinary, and we need to acknowledge them. We decide who should send the letter, and what we should do for that person, and there's usually about 5 or 10 people at every meeting that we reach out to and acknowledge. That's how the meeting begins. It ends with any concerns that I have that I need to share with the team.

This answer originally appeared in The Divine, Too, Is in the Details»

How do you manage your time?

Answered by Will Wright, Stupid Fun Club

We've tried a lot of different things. There was a point a few years ago whenever somebody called a meeting that I had to attend, then whoever called the meeting had to pay me a dollar. And I got a lot of dollars that way. It did make them think twice about calling the meeting, even though it was only a dollar. We would also invite one of my lead artists, a guy named Ocean Quigley, to these general creative meetings. He gets very impatient when things go off track and are not relevant to him, and I found that Ocean was like the canary in the coal mine. Whenever the meeting started getting off track, Ocean would usually raise his hand and say something like, "Oh, do you need me in the meeting anymore?' And then he would try and get out of the meeting. And so, that was the point at which we always knew the meeting had hit diminishing returns, because our canary had put up his hand. It's more of a philosophy, you know, we just try to convey to everybody on the team. It's almost more like you want to encourage everybody to be a hall monitor. "Hey, are we wasting our time here, or not?"

This answer originally appeared in On Will Wright's Team, Would You Be a Solvent, or the Glue?»

So people will actually say that?

Answered by Will Wright, Stupid Fun Club

Oh, yeah. We try to give positive feedback: "Oh, you're right, you know, we're wasting time here. You five can leave." Not making it taboo is the main thing. It is purely a cost-benefit issue, right? It's nothing personal.

This answer originally appeared in On Will Wright's Team, Would You Be a Solvent, or the Glue?»

How do you run meetings?

Answered by Dany Levy, DailyCandy.com

I'm not a big believer in a lot of meetings. When I do run a meeting, I love the term, "hard stop," and in the beginning of a meeting I always like to say, "I have a hard stop at 11:30," because it just sets boundaries, it sets the tone of , let's get this done. This is not a chit-chat. I try to listen as much as I can to the people in the room, but also keep it reined in, so that the meeting doesn't go off in a million different directions. MITIN is a term that I like to use. MITIN is More Information Than I Needed. It's like TMI, but it's just our own little version of it.

This answer originally appeared in In Praise of All That Grunt Work»

How do you run meetings?

Answered by Richard Anderson, Delta Air Lines

One, get the materials out ahead of time and make sure they are succinct and to the point. Second, start the meeting on time. Third, I tend to be a stoic going into the meeting. I want the debate. I want to hear everybody's perspective, so you want to try to ask more questions than make statements. I don't think it's appropriate to use BlackBerrys in meetings. You might as well have the newspaper and open the newspaper up in the middle of the meeting. So let's stay focused on what we're doing. Let's have a really good debate, but it can't get uncollegial. If it gets uncollegial, we actually have a bell you can ring, in the conference room.

This answer originally appeared in He Wants Subjects, Verbs and Objects»

Tell me more about this.

Answered by Richard Anderson, Delta Air Lines

If you are in a really hard debate and somebody veers off the subject and goes after you in a way that isn't fair, you get to ring the bell. It's a violation of the rules of the road. So you ring the bell if something wasn't a fair shot, and we all laugh.

This answer originally appeared in He Wants Subjects, Verbs and Objects»

So when you're running a meeting, what do you do?

Answered by Nell Minow, Corporate Library

I like to be very, very clear at the beginning of the meeting -- this is what we're going to accomplish before the end of the meeting. People have agendas other than achieving that one goal for that meeting, and so you've got to just keep bringing people back to that. People that I work with know that I don't like meetings and that they will do better to just keep it moving.

This answer originally appeared in Think 'We' for Best Results»

How do you run meetings?

Answered by Terry J. Lundgren, Macy’s

First of all, and people know this about me, the meeting's at 8. You're not here at 8:01, you're here at 8, because the meeting's going to start at 8. And I've had to tell a couple of people that now and then: "You have a tendency to be an 8:02 person or an 8:03 person, and it's not good by me. So, from now on, I would like you to be here at 7:55. Everybody else will be here at 8, but you need to be sitting in your chair five minutes before that just because you haven't demonstrated to me that you can do that." And it's just amazing that people, they don't even get it. And they're not, these are not bad people. These are just busy people that can't get off the last phone call or can't finish the last e-mail to get there, discipline themselves to be there on time. But I will tell you this: Eevery time that I have told a person this, it's solved. Because when I look 'em in the eye and tell 'em, "You got an issue," you know, they don't even realize it until you just hit 'em over the head with a frying pan and say: "You got an issue. You've got a tardiness issue, and it doesn't work with me because you're wasting my time and the time of those around us who are here on time. Be on time." And so I think that's just one thing. You do that once, it's over. They are there from that point forward, and they're on time. The second thing is, I like to end on time. I like to have an agenda that we think through, and we say, "This meeting's gonna go for two hours," that we really are finished in two hours and that we force ourselves to carve through the agenda.

This answer originally appeared in Knock-Knock: It's the C.E.O.»

How do you establish the right tone for meetings?

Answered by Kevin Sharer, Amgen

After I became C.E.O., we probably replaced within a year most of the team, for a whole bunch of reasons. I remember when the new team was assembled, having a dinner and sitting around the table and saying: "You know, we're new, we're together, we all feel lucky to be here, but let me tell you something. I've operated in environments where there were master politicians. I'm not a bad politician myself. And so I can see it. And if any of you try to be politicians, I will know it, and I will fire you." We laugh about that now as a table-setting meeting and I think it stuck. I think this is as apolitical an environment as I've ever been in. The flow of information is good and it's fast. It's sort of like being in the infield in a baseball game -- the ball whips around the infield really fast, and the team can keep up. I think being succinct and efficient is also a measure of preparation and command of the facts. The metaphor I would use is, when people come in with a wheelbarrow full of jigsaw puzzle pieces, dump it on the floor in my office and we start inventorying the pieces together and trying to guess what that picture looks like -- we're not going to have too many meetings like that.

This answer originally appeared in Feedback in Heaping Helpings»

What's it like to be in a meeting run by you?

Answered by Anne M. Mulcahy, Xerox Corporation