Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 8, 1990 TAG: 9003082202
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SUSAN HARTE COX NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The answer, according to many business people, is a meeting.
Whether they're sales meetings, rah-rah sessions, crisis management summits or what-we'll-do-next-year bull sessions, most people look forward to meetings about as much as they do a visit to the dentist.
And, according to Industry Week magazine, companies waste $37 billion worth of employees' time on meetings each year.
Robert A. Barnaby, a retired construction executive, says meetings are an old-fashioned way of justifying the existence of vice presidents and divisional sales managers.
"The VPs all have meetings, then the junior VPs, then the district managers, and on down. That leaves the secretary to run the company," he observes. "They should take all the chairs out of conference rooms. That way, meetings would be short, sweet and to the point."
"They should take all the chairs out of conference rooms. That way, meetings would be short, sweet and to the point."
Leslie C. Baron and Joseph W. Cody think 99 percent of meetings are worthless.
"A sales meeting is theoretically used to allow salespeople and operations people to share information about customers," says Baron, an international freight forwarder. "But you end up with salesmengiving dissertations on what they did all week and all the negative responses they got."
Cody, an operations officer for SunTrust banks, adds: "People hate unorganized meetings. You discuss X, Y and Z, then everybody gets up and leaves and nothing is done."
And that, of course, provides the cue for yet another meeting.
If meetings are hated so much, then how have they maintained such a tenacious hold on Corporate America? The reason, many executives say, is that they are a necessary evil.
"It's the best form a company has for communication," says Charles F. Weede, of Professional Management Services International. "It enables large numbers of people to get the same information."
He adds that meetings have become so important in some companies that executives look at job applicants' organizational skills, personality dominance and patience before hiring them. The presumption is that those are indicators of someone's ability to orchestrate meetings, preside over them - and tolerate sitting through them.
Robert M. Atkins of Aaron Rents' internal audit department believes that meetings contribute to a sense of cohesiveness and coordination in companies that are divided by geography and bureaucracy.
"People feel remote from [their] companies now, remote from the hierarchies at the top . . . people in the trenches need to know that they're
Jerry A. Dibble, who directs business communication programs at Georgia State University's College of Business Administration, empathizes with unwilling meeting attendees. But he defends the concept of meetings.
"That's where the most important decisions are made," he says. "It's where you bring together the resources of your organization and use them to make decisions," he says. "If you don't handle that process well, you're losing the edge. The real determining factor will be how well you take different resources and get them to work well together."
That means curing people's dislike of meetings. Which means holding more meetings with academicians, public relations counselors and management consultants eager help you plan better meetings.
Most of these "experts" attempt to address three universal complaints - that meetings are filled with unnecessary people, last too long and waste time.
Bud Carter can't afford to have anyone in his organization fall victim to that terrible threesome. He's the regional manager for The Executive Committee, whose members - presidents and chief executive officers of prosperous businesses - take one valuable day each month and devote it to meetings with small groups of their peers.
Executive Committee meetings appear to glide along effortlessly for eight hours. In fact, they run like clockwork because of the members' attention, participation and preparation.
"My `secret' is, first, preparation," Carter says. "I review the previous month.
"Next comes the agenda - it includes the group's most pressing issues, plus enough diversity to interest the greatest number of people. Before the meeting, I post [the agenda] on the wall so they can see the course of the day and the time allotted for each segment."
Carter sticks to the agenda, and might refer a new idea or subject to a future meeting.
iIt's wise to learn how to conduct meetings, Lough says, because they are often unavoidable.
"You're damned if you do, damned if you don't. If you do not get your experts together from time to time, you're wasting your most valuable human resource. Yet if you get them together unnecessarily, you're also wasting your most valuable human resource."
"Finally, there's discipline," he says. "I have to recognize that, while I orchestrate, the success is dependent on members and their participation. Discipline includes bringing out [quieter people] and reining in [more aggressive ones]."
John R. Lough agrees that discipline - in selecting purpose, participants and agenda for any meeting - separates good meetings from bad.
"We spread the risk in an organization by coming to a group decision," says Lough, a member of the training and meetings management staff at the University of Georgia's business school.
"Another good aspect is that if you call the right people together, you'll have a higher-quality decision. And you get better acceptance of a course of action if people participate in a meaningful way in determining it."
A guide to a successful meeting
DO
Identify a purpose, plan an agenda and disseminate it in advance.
Invite only people who need to be there.
Establish, start, break and stop times, and stick to them.
Have a moderator to keep discussions on track.
Decide what followup actions are needed and set deadlines for them
\ DON'T
Hold unnecessary meetings
Invite everyone who might have an opinion on the subjects being discussed
Let people drone, dominate or avoid participation in discussions
Allow conversations to wander off the subject
Fail to act on decisions made
Sources: Harrison Conference Services, business schools at University of Georgia, Georgia State.
by CNB