Page 55 - Roy W. Rice - CEO Material How to Be a Leader in Any Organization-McGraw-Hill (2009)

36 • CEO Material: How to Be a Leader in Any Organization

want. Offer to help the person find a solution at this point so your new
response does not unempathetically burden the person. (The pain of you
having to go through all these steps at this stage will help to remind you
not to so quickly say “Yes” in the future.)

Run an Effective Meeting and Be an Effective
Meeting Participant

Most people don’t run bad meetings—they run awful meetings. Yet, at
great expense and time, they continue to have them.
If you can’t run an effective meeting, it’s better not to have one. The
damage you do is multiplied by the number of people there.
Leaders participate in lots of meetings. A vice president alone can
have, on average, 70 meetings in a week. Men spend, on average, 11
hours a week in meetings; women spend 8. Of people surveyed by Poly-
Vision Corporation, 75 percent said that their meetings could be more
effective.
Have fewer meetings and only for very important reasons. Identify
a problem, solve a problem, or dispense information to a group simulta-
neously. Do away with a meeting if the only reason to have it is that it’s
Monday morning.
Keep the number of people at meetings as small as possible while
still including everyone who needs to be there. A meeting becomes more
complex with more people.
Focus, and then narrow your focus. Use an agenda to stay on track
to deal with the issues. Your job as the meeting leader is to set the agenda,
manage disruptive behavior, break deadlocks, do a postmortem, follow
up, and plan the next meeting.
Get attendees used to a few simple rules: (1) Deal with difficult
issues first (maybe 50 percent presentation, 50 percent discussion), and
(2) Don’t let someone’s pet peeve dominate.

I have strict rules for staff meetings, which I will tell people in advance:
attendance required, no gossip, no sidebar conversations, stick to the
subject, [and] comments limited to three minutes each. Unless some-
one is expecting a baby, turn off cell phones and BlackBerries.