The Management Bible

Chapter 13. Making Meetings More Effective

IT'S A NEW WORLD OUT THERE ...

Meetings and ...

• How they enable teams to get work done.

• Getting the most out of meetings.

• Understanding common meeting problems—and their fixes.

• Improving your meetings.

MEETINGS PUT TEAMS TO WORK

Meetings are the primary forum in which groups conduct business and communicate with one another. With the proliferation of teams in business today, it pays to master the basic skills of meeting management.

Teams are clearly an idea whose time has come. As organizations continue to flatten their hierarchies and empower front-line workers with more responsibility and authority, teams are the visible and often inevitable result. Consider how one of the best companies runs meetings to respond to this new, team-oriented business environment.

• Say what you will about Jack Welch, former chairman of General Electric (GE), he is one of the most effective and successful managers in the history of American business. Part of his success was a direct result of moving his company away from the old-style autocratic leadership model and toward a new model of participative management based on teams. This new leadership model required a new model of meetings, called work out meetings, which bring workers and managers together in open forums where workers are allowed to ask any question they want and managers are required to respond.

• The results of Welch's influence can be observed at GE's Bayamón, Puerto Rico, lightning arrester plant, where ...