Target's executive team is getting reacquainted at its headquarters in Minneapolis. Interim CEO John Mulligan has moved the company's entire leadership team to the 26th floor of the building to foster clarity and faster decisions, he said in a memo to employees. A redesign will leave the floor plan more open, too.
The relocation is one part of Mr. Mulligan's executive overhaul. What is even more interesting is that Target executives will now have fewer meetings. Mr. Mulligan is scaling back the team's four longstanding groups, either modernizing or eliminating them, to remove a layer of approval. He also changed the name of Target's "executive committee" to "leadership team."
"As we continue to focus on accelerating our transformation, everything matters — including what we call ourselves," he said in the memo, according to a Financial Post report. "All across Target, we need more 'leadership' and less 'committee.'"
Mr. Mulligan is trying to reduce the bureaucracy that plagues so many organizations. Many executive teams find themselves with chronic cases of what one Forbes contributor calls "meetingitis" — the persistence of unnecessary, boring meetings. Nobody enjoys these meetings, or how much time they eat up, but they're treated as a necessary evil in our professional lives. After all, a survey found 43 percent of executives never decline a meeting.
That finding comes from consulting firm Global Integration, which surveyed more than 4,000 people from many of the world's leading companies to learn more about their meeting habits, and the results are pretty eye-opening. On average, a respondent spent two days per week in meetings where 50 percent of the content was not relevant to their jobs. That added up to about 10 years of the average career!
This problem is only getting worse as organizations, including those in healthcare, become more complex and collaborative. But does increased collaboration have to mean more conference calls and meetings? Probably not, but it does mean meetings need to be tighter and more valuable. Quality over quantity, yet again.
Harvard Business Review has some tips for running better meetings. Some seem like common sense — "Don't hold a meeting for the sake of holding a meeting." — that you hope executives would have by the time they reach a C-suite. (But Mr. Mulligan's recent changes suggest this probably happens more often than not in large companies.)
There are also a few refreshing reminders.
The Rule of 7 states that every attendee who makes the meeting group more than 7 people reduces the likelihood of making sound, quick and executable decisions by 10 percent. If the group hits 16 or 17, decision effectiveness nears zero.
Use a decision log to capture every decision made in a meeting. If the log is blank by the end of the meeting, people will want to know why the meeting was held at all. If the log has a couple decisions, but less than you'd expect after 30 or 60 minutes, maybe it's time to revisit the frequency, length or number of people attending meetings.
Excusing people isn't rude. If done gracefully, the excused will probably be quite grateful. A friend of mine recently said she is often caught in meeting runoff — the point in which her responsibilities were addressed, but people around the table linger to talk about matters specific to them and their work. "I just wish my boss would excuse me," my friend said. "I have no idea what they are talking about."
It's also okay to excuse people at the very start. Many people may cast a wide net when scheduling meetings, especially far in advance. As the meeting convenes, it's helpful if the person running it reexamines attendees and whether they play a role in the decisions to be made.
In closing, here's a story from The Onion that so wonderfully captures the essence of the poorly run, overblown and vague meeting. My favorite part is the last line, which mentions follow-up meetings for three consecutive days.
Employees Still Have No Idea What's Going On After Attending Meeting
The staff of Viacom's regional syndication and licensing division have "absolutely no idea" what is happening with their operations, planning, or corporate structure following their four-hour-long operations, planning, and corporate-restructuring meeting, employees said Monday.
"Well, it seems like we are either heading into an 'amazing new era,' or losing our jobs," assistant project coordinator Lisa Morgan said. "Or maybe it's something else altogether. At the very least, I'm fairly sure that this meeting concerned how we operate, plan, and structure our work. I think."
Morgan said she hoped some of the finer details of the meeting would be made clear in one of the follow-up meetings on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.