Meeting management

What is meeting management?

Meeting management is running a team's meetings so each one has a clear purpose and ends in decisions and owned actions. It covers which meetings exist at all and who needs to be in the room. Steven Rogelberg, a UNC Charlotte professor who studies meetings, has built a body of research on making them work better for the people who sit in them.

Why it matters to a revenue leader

A CRO's week is built on recurring meetings, from forecast reviews to one-on-ones. Each layer of management adds its own, and the same deal can be discussed several times a week without anyone deciding anything about it. Every hour a front-line manager spends in internal meetings is an hour away from coaching sellers and working deals with them. In a 2017 HBR article, Leslie Perlow, Constance Noonan Hadley and Eunice Eun made the case that meeting overload is an organizational problem, so lasting fixes have to reach beyond any one person's calendar. For a revenue leader, that means owning the whole meeting load of the sales team.

A utility services company's sales managers each sit in 11 hours a week of recurring internal meetings. The CRO lists every recurring meeting next to the last decision it produced. Four one-hour meetings cannot point to a recent decision. Two are cut and the other two are merged into one, which gives each manager back three hours a week for time in the field with sellers.