Meetings get a bad rap in business today and for good reason—very little gets accomplished in them. I can recall a Dilbert cartoon in which several people sat around a table while the meeting organizer said, “There is no specific agenda for this meeting. As usual, we’ll just make unrelated emotional statements about things which bother us…”
That pretty much sums it up. The majority of meetings are unstructured, uninspiring, and unproductive. But they don’t have to be that way.
Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice-president, holds an average of 70 meetings a week and serves as the last stop before engineers and project managers get the opportunity to pitch their ideas to Google’s co-founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Eight teams consisting of directors, managers, and engineers—all at various stages of product development—answer to Mayer.
In a shop like Google, much of the work takes place in meetings, and her goal is to make sure teams have a firm mandate, strategic direction, and actionable information, while making participants feel motivated and respected. Marisa’s six keys to running successful meetings follow:
