CHAPTER TEN: MANAGING MEETINGS
The goal of this chapter is to teach students that effective meeting participation is a
critical managerial skill.
Teaching Meeting Management
Students will spend much of their future business lives in meetings, and this chapter
provides an opportunity for important practice. Even an instructor facing time constraints
can break students up into small groups, have them enact a meeting for fifteen minutes,
and then have them come back to report the results to the class. Instructors can also break
up the class into groups and assign each to have a meeting that might have occurred in
The chapter describes meeting techniques, and invites students to examine how they
usually participate in meetings. Some questions that can get the discussion going:
1. Do you find yourself typically playing one of the roles described in the chapter?
2. Do you recognize any of these characters in your friends or colleagues?
3. Which meetings that you’ve attended have been productive and which haven’t?
Why?
4. What role does preparation play in a successful meeting?
Teaching Negotiation
Teaching negotiation can be even more time– and resource-intensive than teaching other
communication skills like writing and speaking. But the payoff can be enormous. Here’s
one model currently used at the Harvard Law School:
2. Students break up into smaller groups of about 25 for an introduction to skills
3. Finally, students divide into groups of four for actual practice. Two typical
exercises:
A. Sending the right message through actions, words, and body language. Small
groups meet with a TA for an all-day session. Each member chooses a difficult
communication situation from his own work experience, and role-plays it with
other participants. The effort is videotaped; this serves as the “baseline” to
B. Managing difficult personnel in the workplace. A professor plays a typical
tough-to– manage colleague (for example, a tyrannical boss or a complaining
Teaching LINCOLN PARK REDEVELOPMENT
This short case invites a discussion of everything that can go wrong at an important
meeting. With the best intentions in the world, Clarke has set herself up for failure in a
number of ways that can emerge — and be listed on the chalkboard — as the discussion
progresses. These include:
1. Not sufficiently researching where the major participants stood and using this
information to build a consensus before the meeting,
3. Not briefing team members on where parts of the project stood that weren’t in
their personal territory,
5. Suffering the illusion that because she was leading the meeting, she was the
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6. Not giving participants sufficient time to express their legitimate concerns so
they could be addressed,
8. Insufficient attention to non-verbal or coded communication.
A good opening question: “How well did Clarke prepare for, and manage, the meeting?”
The case addresses an increasingly common middle-management responsibility: leading
cross-functional teams. It invites discussion of how to manage a project when many of
your teammates know more, or have more power, than you do. This provides an
Students should be invited to discuss the differences between these two situations,
drawing on their personal experiences. Once you’ve introduced these two models of
meeting management, ask students to consider how they would communicate differently
Clarke enters the meeting counting on the general expressions of enthusiasm she’d
received from some participants, and on the long-term commitment of others. She starts
Clarke’s opening tone is self-congratulatory: “I‘ve initialed,” “my proposal.” Her goal is
reasonable: to break ground and make the project inevitable. But she’s failed to account
Discussion questions:
(Note: the class may benefit from circulating the following questions before the
discussion.)
1. Why does each participant take the position her or she does at the end?