Escape From Meeting Hell

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Gary Berman, CEO of Greyhawk North America, a construction management and consulting firm in Woodbury, N.Y., is a former stander--and don't think he won't go back to it. He also reserves the right to push meetings to 5 p.m. on Friday, which ensures that employees don't hold court with their long-winded war stories. The natural itch to start the weekend drives people to the heart of the matter; they figure out what needs to be done and go home.

"We're slaves to the agenda"

Let it flow

An agenda can be a blueprint, but it should never be the tool that sets the discourse. Idea generation should be more important than adhering to arbitrary agenda bullet points. That's why Ryan Simons, CEO of Print-Tech, a commercial printing and promotional product outfit in Madison, Wis., rarely lets anyone else see what is on his agenda, and why he monitors strategy meetings with a great deal of elasticity, unafraid to change course on the fly. If bullet point A flows to bullet point C, he's happy to skip B and save it for the following week--better that than encroaching on the living, breathing, developing organism. "There's no magic solution, but it's a constantly changing dynamic," says Simons. "I like to mix it up to see what happens." Another trick he uses to shake out the doldrums is to switch a couple of the attendees in regular meetings, throwing the head of one division (IT perhaps?) into another (marketing?) division's meeting, or simply shrinking the roll call--any combination to keep the voices in the room fresh and the discussions freewheeling and thought-provoking.

"It's just an information dump"

Don't hire the illiterate

If you bring people together strictly to update them on sales numbers, software upgrades, vacation-day policies, and/or baby-pool standings, you get what you stray for. "The only rational defense to interrupt talented people with an information dump is if your employees can't read," says Kenneth Sole. "These are the meetings that induce hypnosis." Meetings are never the place to heap employees with material that they could read via the electronic mailing system. Meetings should be about attacking problems, or else they're going to be about boring employees.

Kevin Grauman, CEO of the Outsource Group, a Walnut Creek, Calif., company that administers outsourced HR functions (and was formerly the top company in the Inc. 500), adheres to the "no information dump" policy. Every gathering is a strategic session to share ideas, get feedback, and distill the overall perspectives of the company. "Employees should be empowered to solve problems and take the risk inherent in participation and not be spoon-fed answers," Grauman says emphatically.

"I've got a room full of yes men and yes women"

Make your bobbleheads engage

If all you want to see is a smiling face in complete agreement with your mandates, hang a mirror in the office. John G. Miller, author of the QBQ! The Question Behind the Question, has monitored some 10,000 hours of meetings, workshops, and training sessions, and he's concluded that a room full of nodding yes men and yes women wastes everyone's time. Miller has a few basic exercises to combat bobblehead tendencies: (1) Plant seeds by sending out a question of the week prior to the meeting so that people will come in with thoughts that they can be expected to share; (2) Throw out a problem and break up employees into groups of two or three for 10 minutes, and then have them report their ideas. A short shift into teams changes the dynamic of the room, both because employees are usually more comfortable talking to peers and because it cuts down on lecturing; and (3) Praise those who speak up and participate. If managers reward only the completion of projects, there is no acknowledgment of the work that's done within meetings.

Stuart Levine, a strategic consultant, author of The Six Fundamentals of Success, and a CEO with 25 employees of his own, is known to hand out Tootsie Roll Pops on the spot for intriguing thoughts. It's a modest but effective little gimmick. "Recognizing contributions gets the intellectual capital flowing and brings the more introverted off the bench," says Levine.

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