Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business

Death By Meeting A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business

Author: Patrick Lencioni Publisher: Wiley, John & Sons, Inc. Date of Publication: 2004 ISBN: 0787968056 Number of Pages: 260 pages

About the Author

Patrick Lencioni Patrick Lencioni is the founder and president of The Table Group, Inc., a specialized management-consulting firm focused on organizational health. Since establishing the firm in 1997, Lencioni has become one of the nations leading experts on executive team development. While coaching and consulting to hundreds of CEOs and executives, Lencioni began to observe fundamental behavioral patterns among his clients that later formed the basis of his original theories on leadership. Lencioni penned his first best-selling book, The Five Temptations of a CEO (1998), positioning him as a leader in the trend of business fiction. Two years later in the fall of 2000, he completed his second leadership fable, The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive. His highly anticipated book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, was added to the Lencioni Leadership Collection in the spring of 2002. And his latest page-turning fable, Death by Meeting, was released February 2004. In addition to his books, Lencioni's leadership theories have appeared in a variety of publications, most notably Harvard Business Review, which featured Pat's original theory on corporate values (July 2002). Other publications include Drucker Foundation's Leader to Leader, California CEO, Executive Excellence, Association Management, Human Resource Executive and The San Jose Mercury News.

The Big Idea Not to be dismissed as mere drudgery, Patrick Lencioni reveals that the conduct and way meetings are managed; actually mirror the organization's leadership and management skills and competencies, its culture and true state including where it is likely headed. Executive meetings provide visible snapshots of organizations flawed by mediocrity, disenchantment, complacency or if companies are fired up by passion, creativity, and excellence. Related to this, Lencioni shares a meeting model grounded in drama, positive conflict and context as a means to improve meeting structure, participation, productivity and output. The result is engaging and dynamic interactions that lead to positive business performance.

Drama The first ten minutes is the most crucial in any meeting. Avoid mindnumbing conversations that will allow your participants' attention to drift away. Set the stage, hook their attention and get them truly, meaningfully involved. How To Meet · Do not start meetings by rambling. Use dramatic, relevant opening statements likely to provoke intelligent debates and discussions. Published by BusinessSummaries, Building 3005 Unit 258, 4440 NW 73rd Ave, Miami, Florida 33166 ©2003 BusinessSummaries All rights reserved. No part of this summary may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, photocopying, or otherwise, without prior notice of BusinessSummaries.com

Death By Meeting By Patrick Lencioni

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Encourage healthy conflict. Avoid watering down differing opinions. Do not be autocratic and unilaterally influence outcome of meetings. Instead, foster passionate discussions of issues. Ultimately, it may lead to a more effective decision-making process and resolution. Thrive on collective wisdom. Use the executive meetings as forums for healthy discussions of important issues affecting the departments represented. Do not wait to resolve the issue in one to one discussions in the confines of an executive office.

Mining Positive Conflict The key is intuitiveness. The leader must be keenly sensitive to recognizing people with opposing views and resolute to table items with conflicting issues. How To · Force participants to air latent issues, buried conflicts, or differing opinions. · Be paternal. Occasionally compliment and reassure meeting participants that airing different points of view is actually helpful and effective at objectively looking at an issue. · Tow the line. The leader reminds the group that as soon as a decision has been arrived at, regardless of the outcome, it must be wholly supported.

Develop the Context Meetings lose structure and meaning precisely because there is lack of focus and too many issues saddled in one weekday or monthly or bi-monthly meeting. How To · Set the right number of meetings with the appropriate objective, agenda, and function. Most meetings become unfocused and unwieldy because there are far too few meetings organized and too many issues requiring resolution in a single meeting. Lencioni recommends the following number and nature of meeting prototype.

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Death By Meeting By Patrick Lencioni

Type of Meeting Daily check-in

Meeting Time 5 minutes

· · ·

Weekly Tactical

45 to 90 minutes

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Monthly strategic or ad-hoc strategic meetings (may be limited to once a month or more when an urgent need arises to convene meeting participants; issue/s can not wait until the next meeting to be settled) Quarterly off-site review

2 to 4 hours

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· 1 to 2 days

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Objective/Purpose Informal, casual discussion. Keep tabs with daily schedule and activities of other department heads. Opportunity for follow-ups and some quick discussion and immediate resolution with another department head. Formal, sit-down weekly meeting reserved for purely operational, tactical issues, report of weekly activities and metrics. Raise, analyze, discuss, and resolve critical and immediate strategic issues influencing long-term business success. Limit to one or two items.

Review strategy; discuss environmental scan, competitive landscape, people and resources. Focus on task at hand, limit social activities.

· Participants must come prepared for meetings to ensure healthy discussions. Hence, identifying the nature of a meeting will help them focus their presentations and issues. · Get the people on the same page. It is extremely important to resolve issues and reinforce agreements in meetings. · The leader breaks the tie. In all meetings except the daily check-in, a passionate discussion of unfiltered, differing points of view is critical and encouraged to allow the leader to make the resolution. It is crucial that the leader makes the final decision after weighing all points of view specially when there is no compelling argument to swing a vote to one side. · Recognize that meetings are a venue for intelligent people to come together and debate issues. Disagreement naturally occurs but resolving the conflict is what makes the meeting productive, dynamic and engaging.

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Death By Meeting By Patrick Lencioni

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Avoiding issues that merit debate guarantees the likelihood of boiling frustrations and boring meetings. Eventually, these frustrations manifest itself as unproductive personal conflict among managers and with leadership thus, leading to politics. · Leaders must remember that bad meetings exact a toll on human beings who must endure them. Bad meetings provoke in an organization negative emotions like anger, lethargy and cynicism.

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