Part II: Where’s the Boss? Driving Results in a Meeting

Posted on March 9, 2012

Last week I ranted a bit about how CEOs shouldn’t listen to the “time-wasting” bad rap that meetings have, but instead should make their meetings powerful, where they leverage the collective wisdom and experience of their top teams. This week I’m enumerating specific techniques to make meetings produce real results.

Specific Techniques to Make meetings “Work”

The key to making meetings incredibly productive is having the CEO (or a powerful executive on the team) require all meeting participants to follow these rules:

1. Every participant must prepare before the meeting. If everyone has received and read the handouts, there is no need to read them together at the start of the meeting. Your most disciplined execs will do this, so please don’t punish them by making them sit through the same material again because an undisciplined executive didn’t—even if it’s you, the CEO.
2. There must be a strong facilitator to keep the meeting on track, force decisions and assign accountability for results. Un-facilitated meetings are disastrous. It can be an insider who facilitates, as long as they retain control of the meeting.
3. Someone has to walk into the meeting with a point of view and a proposal for action. Groups are terribly inefficient at gaining momentum toward a specific solution. Better to point them in a rational direction and have them object, then go in a different direction, than to have them figure out the appropriate direction as a team.
4. The only participants in a meeting with the CEO should be those who have analyzed the situation with the same level of diligence that the CEO has, and who can give a concise but accurate overview of the situation to the CEO. Lower level team members can meet with their bosses before the CEO meeting to pass great ideas and solutions upward.
5. Meetings in which the CEO senses that participants aren’t prepared must be shut down. Reprimand the slackers and warn them not to repeat the behavior. I’ve seen many an executive who can’t or won’t walk into a meeting with a proposal. Often they’re afraid that they’ll be wrong, and don’t want that responsibility. They need to be replaced. These are not executives, and middle market CEOs need real executives who have the courage to lead and make/recommend decisions.

Sometimes CEOs are big meeting culprits themselves, lacking the discipline to prepare for their own meetings. They often prefer meetings in which they are informed by their teams. This doesn’t harm the CEOs productivity, but it does harm everyone else’s. While much of this is just a matter of self-discipline, one approach is to have the CEO’s assistant collect all the reports/data a few hours before the meeting, and then reserve 30 minutes before the meeting for the CEO to study up.

If you’re the CEO who needs to stay tuned in to some of the middle management activities, you may find yourself in meetings you don’t run which burn up time. These meetings can be addictive, but building dashboards or monthly drop-level 1:1’s to get an update may be more efficient.

Mid-market CEOs are very high value assets to their companies. All they have to contribute is their time. Demand that all meetings be powerful and that real “work” proceeds from them. Make meetings productive and decision making machines. Add top grade c-level execs and meet with them often to drive executive productivity higher and higher, and to raise enterprise value with each minute the CEO spends in those meetings.