In the past few decades there have been hundreds and maybe thousands of articles written about how to run a successful meeting. In my mind, it’s a lot of thunder and not much lightening.
For instance, some articles suggest that every meeting have a written agenda. I think a better idea is to have written agendas for meetings that require written agendas, and no agenda for those that do not.
Some articles suggest that every meeting have written minutes and follow-up. Again, if a meeting requires that, do it. If not, don’t waste time and clutter up peoples’ email.
Some articles explain where to seat people at a meeting. Some recommend not using chairs at all. I’ve seen experts suggest “talking sticks” (actually, a dry magic marker) that gets passed from speaker to speaker. Others require that a person not speak twice before everyone has spoken once.
It seems, too, in the articles I read that everyone but everyone complains about too many useless meetings. In fact, useless and time-consuming meetings appear to be a blot on the business landscape.
Where I work, if the meetings become useless we just stop having them. It may take us a session of two to figure that out, but usually not more than that.
But there is one element of a meeting that I have noticed over time to be not only a useful indicator of the health of the meeting, but of the dynamics of the company more generally. It goes something like this: A meeting is called. Issues are presented. Polite discussion ensues. Consensus is reached. The meeting breaks and everyone goes out to execute.
What’s missing? Well, debate. A little back-and-forth. A little prickly back-and-forth. Someone storming around the room. Someone banging his shoe on the table. Some passion and energy.
Occasionally, just to emphasize the uselessness of these kinds of calm, happy, polite meetings, someone who attended the meeting will show up in your office five minutes after the meeting ends, furious at “what just happened.”
That person (the videotaped replay will show) inevitably said little or nothing at the meeting. It’s just that nobody noticed.
An article by Garry Emmons, "Seeking Silent Voices", in the recent HBS Alumni Bulletin addresses just such a dynamic that occurs all-to-often in polite, sometimes cowed, and occasionally broken companies. Here are 6 take-aways:
1. This propensity to maintain silence, a flaw at once personal and organizational, is “widespread and problematic” in both the public and the private sectors, says HBS professor Amy Edmondson, who chairs the Doctoral Programs and teaches in the Technology and Operations Management unit. “To cite one example, former HBS doctoral student Jim Detert and I interviewed some 200 people of all ranks and functions in a high-tech multinational. We found to a very significant degree that people did not speak up about things they deemed important. Most of those were not ‘bad news’ things; to our surprise we found that people were reluctant to voice what they perceived to be good ideas, unless they were extraordinarily confident they would be well-received. And this in a firm that lives and dies by its ideas.”My favorite vignette from Emmon’s article is courtesy of one of the icons of American business, whose simple philosophy around consensus meetings is highlighted below:
2. Edmondson says this reluctance to speak up stems variously from fears that superiors will not like the idea or that it may appear to criticize the status quo, which most people find reassuringly familiar or dangerous to challenge. Edmondson sums up the mental calculation this way: “The potential costs to me for speaking out seem reasonably certain and somewhat immediate; the potential benefit to me for speaking out seems rather uncertain and definitely long-range.”
3. From the Oval Office to the boardrooms of Detroit and everywhere in between, “fundamental but highly controversial issues often are not surfaced,” former Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense, Ford Motor Company president, and World Bank president Robert S. McNamara (MBA ’39) told the Bulletin in 2004. The reason, McNamara explained, is that such issues are deemed too threatening to organizational harmony or to individuals’ career advancement. As a result, the validity of a principal U.S. rationale for the Vietnam War, the “domino theory,” was never debated at the highest levels, McNamara said, nor was Detroit’s received wisdom that the American public would be reluctant to buy compact, fuel-efficient, and designed-for-safety cars.
4. Developing disagreement and “high-contention” decision-making at the loftiest levels of the organization were things that HBS professor Bill George of the Organizational Behavior unit insisted on when he took over as CEO of Medtronic, the medical-devices company, in 1991. . .“If you want good decision-making, contention is essential,” George says. “When I joined Medtronic, one of the things undermining its performance was conflict avoidance. To reverse that, we established a system that had a COO in charge of line operations along with a vice chairman of equal power who was responsible for quality, for being alert to any possible problems, and for raising questions about them. You need a team at the top where high contention is demanded and rewarded. If it doesn’t start at the top, it will not operate in other places.”
5. During the decision-making process, George explains, this means asking probing questions and insisting that managers present each situation in objective terms, rather than with a positive spin. “You must acknowledge and thank those who disagree by telling them that they made the discussion, and hence the ultimate decision, much better,” George says. “You need to reward and promote the mavericks or else the organization will lose its creative edge. You try to create tension inside because the outside challenge is so great.”
6. Many observers note that one of the factors contributing to the preeminence of Toyota, arguably the world’s most successful company, is its openness to learning, driven by humility. History shows that the best and the brightest — the smartest guys in the room — often make mistakes because they won’t listen to what they falsely believe is not worth hearing. Shutting out voices that might say otherwise can be risky. Decisions are seldom better for silence, and overcoming that is a key task for the leader of any organization.
At a meeting of one of General Motors’ top committees in the 1920s, GM president Alfred P. Sloan Jr. said, “Gentlemen, I take it we are all in complete agreement on the subject here.” Heads nodded around the table. “Then,” continued Sloan, “I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting, to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.”This happened ninety years ago. It’s time, the experts in Emmons' article would suggest, that we learn Sloan’s lesson.
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