Meetings can be a great way to reach intelligent decisions, creative brainstorming, task
mapping, or major events announcement. I had an unforgettable intern experience in
Honeywell in winter 2013. As we know Honeywell is an American multinational
conglomerate company that produces a variety of consumer products, engineering,
aerospace systems for individual consumer to major corporations and even government.
Honeywell was founded in 1906, headquartered in Morristown, New Jersey. I did my
internship in the Finance department in Life Safety, Honeywell, Shanghai. Once I had a
quarterly group meeting experience that around a whole day to get sales, purchasing,
financing, engineering, and information technology together to discuss how to keep
continuing growth and profitability in the next quarter, and also how to let employees in
different countries own the same highly skills to continue to compete in a global
environment.
Our meeting type is kind of mash-up the Quarterly General Meeting and Shareholders
Meeting. The director sent a notice through company’s external system to all the
department of company a week before the meeting hold to confirm the newest meeting
date and place. Before the meeting hold, each of us would receive a very detailed agenda
sent by the director explain the time and sequence which department would go to present.
Each relevant department needs to prepare a presentation about quarterly working status to
their district manager and company’ shareholders. When the meeting starts, the director
gives us a very welcome opening and helps introduce everyone. Then each of the
department leader start introducing want quarterly goals they already reached and the
deadline of the current working project would finish. This meeting is separate by two
parts, morning meeting and afternoon meeting. In the afternoon, we identify the future task
in the next quarterly to next semiannual, estimates resource requirements we need to meet
with, assign the responsibility and manage the future risk. Moreover, we resolve the
potential conflict, as it would occur in different department. This could encourage
employee and external department to join the participation, and gain a deeper
understanding of each other avoiding the conflict that could reach goal efficiency.
After finishing each department present, we did not ask each other with the type B
question that led a little lack of communication. People are very busy sit there to prepare
their own presentation. If we ask more about the type B questions, people would like to
join the conversation. Some people from relevant group ask several Type B question that
