Business deans explain how to avoid going off key in meetings

Interested in more work-life content? Check out our weekly Careers newsletter. Sent out every Sunday afternoon.
Yolande Chan, dean of McGill University’s Desautels Faculty of Management, sees meetings as something to orchestrate. You plan beforehand. During the meeting you must listen carefully, sensitive for off-key notes or orchestra members not fully contributing. You must bring everyone into harmony and hopefully end with a crescendo. More prosaically, but equally helpfully, Gina Grandy, dean of Haskayne School of Business at the University of Calgary, says you should aim to end the meeting early, which will win its own applause.
They were two of four business school deans I turned to and interviewed as I’ve been exploring how to improve meetings. They are career academics – not businesspeople imported to head a business school – and the colleagues they oversee have been trained, if not overtrained, in critique. But their meetings are much like yours, marred by tangents, emotions, grievances, clashing viewpoints and people who decline to say anything. Crescendos and applause are rare, even if sought after.
Academics like to classify ideas in categories and Ms. Grandy chose three buckets, all fitting together under the theme that process matters. Chairs need to focus on – and take pride in – process.
The chair sets the tone for a meeting. They must be clear about the purpose and nature of the meeting – is it an open discussion, is it information sharing or is it for decision-making? That manages expectations: If it’s just a conversation, for example, there probably wouldn’t be an agenda even though some people automatically become irritated if there’s no meeting map. She starts Faculty Council meetings by reminding those present it’s a decision-making meeting, it’s all right for people to disagree but they should do so in a healthy, constructive way, allowing everyone a chance to speak. After the first few daily or weekly meetings for a team, as the culture is set, that recitation may fall aside, but for less frequent meetings she recommends restating the guidelines. In advance of the meeting, she may advise certain individuals she will call on them to open the discussion rather than leaving it to chance. Finally on tone, she says, “talk less and listen more if you are the chair.”
Her second bucket is to know the rules of governance that guide the organization. When she first became a dean, at the University of Regina, she read Roberts Rules of Order, which is needed for Faculty Council but also helps informal sessions. “It was not the most interesting way to spend a day or so, but it was probably one of the most valuable things I did,” she says.
Finally: End early or, at the very least, on time. People will love this.
Darren Dahl, dean of the University of British Columbia Sauder School of Business, stresses the importance of having the right people in the room – people who intend to participate fully and have important knowledge or other inputs to offer. You want individuals who have a variance of opinion and must take advantage of that diversity. “Meetings are only effective when you are having different ideas presented and challenged. You have to have the ability to challenge ideas in meetings for them to be useful,” he says.
You also must be judicious in the number of meetings or you end up frantically attending meetings all day. He recalls being told that you should only add a meeting or committee for a team if you take one away. Also avoid getting into automatic slots of 30-minute or one-hour or two-hour meetings: Meetings should take the time they need to take – and no more. A constant challenge he finds in meetings is avoiding having them dominated by one person. “You lose value if you don’t ensure everyone has voice in a meeting,” he says.
Susan Christoffersen, dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, was a finance professor, concerned with the dynamics of markets and mutual funds rather than the dynamics of meetings. But as she started to take on leadership roles, she realized it was important to make sure she was using people’s time as wisely as possible. In that vein, one crucial recent moment was beginning to sense a committee had become wasteful and so she asked participants how to better reshape their work, which she believes will reinvigorate the group.
Another crucial lesson was to learn to hold back on her own opinions. In the past, as a professor, she was often among the first to speak at meetings – professors, she notes, are used to being in front of a class, pontificating – and she had to restrain herself as she moved into leadership posts to give room for others to advance ideas. “If you speak too soon you form your judgments too quickly without listening to the other ideas. Sometimes I have had to revise my thinking because I have jumped the gun,” she says, while adding the chair has to make sure the discussion has some structure. “You want to guide the conversation, but you don’t want to direct the conversation.”
Ms. Chan’s orchestra needs time to find its way. At a recent meeting, up against a deadline to complete their work that day, she found people divided, one person needing time to vent, and she declared that they would need to ignore that deadline and meet the next day to come to a better conclusion. Meetings need agendas and objectives, but she doesn’t like rigid targets. The group has to decide, given the circumstances and dynamics, what road to travel or the chair will be undermined in implementation by resistance not allowed its proper airing. She finds mindful listening critical, to pick up on discordant notes or people holding back expressing their views.
Ms. Chan is an engineer by training, an expert in information technology, but she stresses that people are not integrated circuits. To achieve a desired outcome with technology if it’s designed well the outcome should be fine. With meetings – with people – it’s more volatile.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.