A Brilliant Meeting-management Technique

Some years ago, I was on a campus search committee that was chaired by one of the university deans. As search committees are, we were tasked with winnowing down a large group of applicants to a small group of finalists.

As anyone who has taken on this unenviable task knows, the process can be both long and excruciating, as discussion threatens to spiral into unending cycles that have no natural endpoint. There’s always more that can be said about a candidate, or things already said that can be rephrased, or other dimensions of consideration that could be invoked. And that’s just for a single candidate – the same dynamic applies to the discussion of every candidate, which means the process of winnowing a pool can be both hugely time-consuming and exhausting.

There are lots of ways to short-circuit some of this process without unduly short-circuiting the necessary due diligence: sometimes committee members are asked to come to the first meeting with a force-ranked list of candidates, or with the candidates sorted into tiers of preference, or with a “top three” list. In all of those cases, though, the most natural (and common) agenda structure for the meeting involves going around the table and asking each committee member to explain her or his reasons for organizing their list the way they did, which of course threatens to throw everyone into a vortex of conversational churn that is likely to generate maximum discussion for minimal gain. Useful, even essential information will come out of it, but at the cost of much less-useful, less-essential talk.

This particular dean did something I had never seen anyone do before, and that has changed the way I approach decision-making in meetings. Instead of going through the list of candidates and discussing all of them, he started by taking us through the list and asking one question about each one:

“Does anyone believe this person should be a finalist?”

If no one spoke up, then we were finished talking about that candidate. If someone did speak up, then we put that candidate’s name aside and moved on to the next one. 

This process took, literally, no more than five minutes. At the end of those five minutes, we had a very small list of names and were prepared to invest all of our remaining meeting time talking about which of them should rise to the level of a finalist. (And if we had established that the whole group considered only two or three of the candidates on the list acceptable as finalists, the meeting would literally have been over, its mission accomplished.)

This approach accomplished two things, both elegantly and efficiently:

• It established immediately which candidates were considered by no one on the committee to be eligible for finalist status. (In a more traditional committee meeting, we would have gradually figured that out over the course of a long conversation about multiple candidates that, unbeknownst to the committee members, everyone already considered unacceptable .)
• It ensured that even if only one person on the committee considered a candidate acceptable, that candidate received full consideration by the whole group.

In other words, although this strategy might seem on the surface to be perfunctory, it did not actually result in any candidate receiving less than full consideration. The only candidates excluded from further discussion were those that everyone in the group had come to the meeting already considering unacceptable. 

Since my experience on that search committee, I’ve applied a similar principle not only in the context of recruitments, but also in other group decision-making situations. For example, when discussing a policy change in a group, if it starts seeming very clear that everyone agrees with the change, I will gently intervene and ask “Does anyone feel that this change is a bad idea?”. (Or, of course, if the group seems to be negatively inclined, I’ll ask “Does anyone feel that this change is a good idea?”)

One danger of this approach lies in the fact that people do not always feel comfortable speaking up in a group setting, especially if their own view is at odds with what they believe is the prevailing group position. But this is also a danger of relying on extensive discussion – and, in any case, part of a leader’s job is to foster an organizational culture that tolerates and encourages the expression of minority views.

That, in fact, will be the topic of my subscribers-only Thursday column this week – so if you’re not already a subscriber, consider joining us!