MAN 3730 Module 5 Fixing Meetings and Hiring Interviews Example

Ninety Minutes, No Decisions: Fixing Meetings and Interviews at a Marketing Agency

Student Name

Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, Thomas Edison State University

MAN-3730: Managerial Communications

Mentor Name

Month Day, Year

Ninety Minutes, No Decisions: Fixing Meetings and Interviews at a Marketing Agency

Introduction

Meetings and interviews are the two structured conversations managers conduct most often, and both are easy to run badly. Veltsos and Hynes (2022) treat each as a communication event that needs planning, purposeful conduct and follow-up. This report evaluates both at Summit Line Creative, a composite marketing agency in Denver with 240 employees, where staff complain about meetings and where recent hires for account management have not worked out.

Current Practice: Meetings

The leadership team of eight meets every Monday for 90 minutes. There is no agenda; the chief executive opens with updates, and discussion follows whatever topics arise. Decisions are rarely stated or recorded, so the same issues return weeks later. Across the agency, a two-week calendar review found that employees spend an average of about 11 hours a week in scheduled meetings, and account teams hold a daily 30-minute status meeting that often runs long. In a staff survey, 61 percent rated most meetings they attend as a poor use of time.

Current Practice: Interviews

Account manager candidates are interviewed by three to five people, each asking their own questions. Interviewers compare impressions informally afterward. Of nine account managers hired in the past two years, four left or were dismissed within a year, and exit discussions suggest that weak skills in managing client expectations, which the interviews never tested, were a common cause.

Analysis: Meetings

Research shows that meeting problems affect more than time. Rogelberg et al. (2006) found that the time employees spend in meetings was related to fatigue and perceived workload, especially among people strongly focused on accomplishing their own tasks, and that how effective employees judged their meetings to be was related to their well-being. Kauffeld and Lehmann-Willenbrock (2012), coding the interaction in teams' actual meetings, found that functional behaviors such as problem-solving statements and action planning were associated with team productivity and organizational success, while dysfunctional behaviors such as complaining were associated with lower success. Summit Line's leadership meeting, with no agenda and no action planning, produces exactly the pattern linked to poor results, and the volume of meetings across the agency adds fatigue without matching value.

Veltsos and Hynes (2022) describe the practical elements: a clear purpose, an agenda distributed in advance, the right participants, a facilitator who keeps discussion on track, and minutes that record decisions and assignments.

Analysis: Interviews

Levashina et al. (2014), reviewing decades of research on structured employment interviews, concluded that structure, including questions based on a job analysis, the same questions for every candidate, and rating scales with defined anchors, improves the reliability and validity of interviews and reduces some biases. Summit Line's interviews lack all three elements. Because each interviewer asks different questions, the agency cannot compare candidates on the competencies that matter most for account managers.

Recommendations

For meetings, the leadership team should adopt a 50-minute default with an agenda circulated by Friday, each item labeled as information, discussion or decision, and a decision log updated at the end of every meeting. Agency-wide, recurring meetings should default to 25 or 50 minutes, daily status meetings should become three-times-weekly 15-minute stand-ups with a shared written board on other days, and each manager should cancel or shorten at least one recurring meeting.

For interviews, the agency should identify five competencies for account managers from a short job analysis, including managing client expectations, and write a structured guide with two behavioral or situational questions per competency, rating scales with defined anchors and assigned questions for each interviewer. A role-play in which the candidate responds to an unhappy client should be added, and interviewers should rate independently before discussing.

Trade-offs and Measures

Agendas and structured guides take preparation time, and some leaders may feel constrained by them. Shorter meetings risk cutting discussion that matters, which the decision log helps reveal. The agency should track meeting hours per employee, the share of leadership agenda items closed with a decision, survey ratings of meeting value and first-year retention of new account managers.

A Sample Agenda

A sample leadership agenda shows the format: one, decision, approve the spring campaign budget, ten minutes, owner the creative director; two, discussion, client retention trends, fifteen minutes, owner the client services lead; three, information, office move timeline, five minutes, owner operations. Each item states what kind of outcome is needed, which keeps discussion focused.

Conclusion

Summit Line's meetings consume time without producing decisions, and its interviews test the wrong things. Planning meetings around decisions and conducting structured interviews tied to the job, as both the course text and research recommend, would make the agency's two most common managerial conversations more productive.

References

Kauffeld, S., & Lehmann-Willenbrock, N. (2012). Meetings matter: Effects of team meetings on team and organizational success. Small Group Research, 43(2), 130-158. https://doi.org/10.1177/1046496411429599

Levashina, J., Hartwell, C. J., Morgeson, F. P., & Campion, M. A. (2014). The structured employment interview: Narrative and quantitative review of the research literature. Personnel Psychology, 67(1), 241-293. https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12052

Rogelberg, S. G., Leach, D. J., Warr, P. B., & Burnfield, J. L. (2006). Not another meeting! Are meeting time demands related to employee well-being? Journal of Applied Psychology, 91(1), 83-96. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.91.1.83

Veltsos, J. R., & Hynes, G. E. (2022). Managerial communication: Strategies and applications (8th ed.). SAGE.