To work with your boss, you must know your boss. So it's a crucial question: What do senior executives think of meetings and the people who manage them? Really, each individual relationship between a meeting planner and a boss is a different story. Some are fairy tales, complete with happy endings, and others are nightmares from which the characters never wake up.
In June, 100 senior executives responded to Successful Meetings' survey, offering their opinions of meetings and meeting planners. Only 32 percent rated internal meeting planners as essential to the implementation of the meetings that are most important to the success of their organizations. Additionally, few executives ranked planners as essential in these other key planning functions: purchasing (26 percent), creating content (23 percent), site selection (27 percent), and marketing (26 percent). The one area where a large number of respondents found planners' contributions essential was meetings logistics (50 percent). And planners' salaries, always a good indicator of how much organizations value them, have hardly climbed at all, rising a barely perceptible 0.52 percent between 2000 and 2002, according to SM's 2003 State of the Industry Report.
Why does upper management have such a low opinion of the value of meeting planners? The reasons are complex, but with analysis, useful lessons can be gleaned from the complicated tangle of human and organizational relationships that comprise our industry.
Corporate Castaways
It's a common complaint: Meeting planners only get noticed when something goes wrong. The rest of the time, they're nearly anonymous, underrepresented and underappreciated by the supervisors who sign their paychecks and hand out promotions. "It's true -- sometimes when a meeting is planned really, really well, the planners are not seen," admits Mark A. Williams, director of travel and meetings management for the global professional services company Price-waterhouseCoopers (PwC).
Usually, says Washington D.C.-based meetings expert Joan Eisenstodt, executives who run organizations don't acknowledge the importance of professional meeting planning until it's too late, and by that time, "They're being sued because someone was injured on site, or got food poisoning, or they had to cancel the meeting."
Vickie Kress, director of user conference services for Minneapolis-based software company Softbrands Manufacturing, says that in her experience, people who are not directly involved in meeting planning tend to take a simplistic view of what it entails. "I work full time on our annual user conference, and I take care of every aspect of it, from designing content to picking out the little umbrellas in the drinks," she relates. "But very few people in my company think about the user conference until they get ready to book their airplane tickets. I feel vulnerable because my performance for the entire year will be measured in about a two-hour time frame by my company's executives on the morning of our general session."
Professionals like Kress are especially vulnerable to having their value go unrecognized because much of the time, their efforts take place behind the scenes. "Meeting planners are extremely important, but I can understand why an executive who does not get involved in the nitty-gritty of meetings may fail to see how difficult it is to make them work," says Williams, who, as a member of PwC's upper management team, has a number of meeting planners reporting to him.
Drawing on better than two decades of experience in the meetings industry, Eisenstodt concludes that planners are second-class citizens in their organizations because of a complex set of circumstances, including age and gender biases. "Meeting planners are the worst at tooting their own horns, because historically the people who plan meetings are women from the administrative ranks, and those women are taught to be humble," Eisenstodt theorizes. "And in addition to gender, we're dealing with age issues. The senior person is usually an older male, and the planner is a young female. That becomes a real tough issue."
Raising the Bar
Although some planners are stuck in limiting roles, many are working to elevate themselves and the profession, despite the challenges. "Meeting planners somehow need to do a better job marketing themselves," asserts PwC's Williams. "We make some very, very tough demands of our planners, and often they don't have time to show how much money they saved, or how the meeting came off without with a hitch." Yet according to the June SM survey, 55 percent of executives have frequent interaction with their planners. So the opportunity for planners to market themselves does exist. Perhaps the best chance planners have to showcase their abilities to do more than just manage logistics is when they present upper management with information to make a decision.
Executives prefer to make the final calls on meetings decisions because they're responsible for budgets, explains Williams, but planners present the criteria executives consider. "In our organization, the meeting planner does all the legwork, and then sits down with the executive, and the executive will make the final choices." It's a key point of interaction between planners and their bosses.
Bruce Harris, CEO of Twinsburg, OH-based third-party meetings management firm Conferon, concurs. "We spend most of our time dealing with meeting planners, but with the large decisions, like the final say on contracts, we could end up talking to executive directors or vice presidents," he says. "But there are a lot of different dynamics between planners and executives. Planners tend to be smart, resourceful, pragmatic people, who can end up handling many types of things besides planning."
Planners need to use those skills when they present information they have gathered to the executive decision-maker. If the executive is responsive, offering big-picture analysis along with options raises the level of dialogue, and gives planners the chance to demonstrate their ability to handle bigger tasks. That's the first step to being given responsibility.
In fact, increasing the level of communication between planners and upper management may actually be more necessary right now. Meetings have come under increased scrutiny in cash-strapped corporations and associations. This means planners are actually more important than ever.
Breaking the Mold
However put-upon planners may be, there are success stories out there that are excellent examples of where you might take your own career, given enough ingenuity and hard work. In many organizations, the profile and importance of meeting planning is on the rise. Kevin Iwamoto, global airline and car supplier manager for computer manufacturer Hewlett-Packard, is also president and CEO of the Alexandria, VA-based National Business Travel Association (NBTA), where he has created a special meetings committee dedicated to educating members on the subject. "The costs of meetings, especially with penalty clauses for attrition, are huge, and the data surrounding those expenses can be very fuzzy," he says. "Corporations want cost savings and better-controlled meeting programs."
It's a wake-up call for planners that executives expect a more sophisticated approach to meeting management. "It's your role to understand where meetings fit into your organization's strategic direction. A high-level executive expects you to know that," says Iwamoto. "You're being paid for your expertise." This means doing research, he says, and learning where meetings fit into the equation within each of the business units. "It's a lot of work, but if you can figure out the whole equation, think of the value that you bring to the company," he enthuses. "You'll be one of the few people that understand the whole organization."
John Graham is incoming president and CEO of the American Society of Association Executives, and outgoing president and CEO of the American Diabetes Association (ADA). He's a busy executive who expects a lot from ADA's managing director of meetings, Mary Pat Cornett. "We conduct three hundred to four hundred meetings each year, and the planner's job is to understand what each meeting is trying to accomplish," Graham says. "She needs to understand all the facets of the organization, and work with her staff to support everything from board meetings, to training meetings, to annual meetings. She also has bottom-line budget responsibilities for generating attendance as well as trade show booth sales."
It's a serious job: In addition to a complete mastery of the big organizational picture and the logistics of planning, Graham expects Cornett to keep subtleties in mind as well. "Many of our members are women with children, who will need day care," he says. "And many of our members are diabetic, so we're concerned with the food we serve. It's important that we always provide menus that are appropriate."
David Kliman, founder and president of The Kliman Group, a Sausalito, CA-based consultancy, and former chair of Meetings Professionals International, started out as a planner and ended up a top executive. And his story is not so rare. "When I was working as a young salesperson at The Plaza in New York City, a client called me to offer me a job as a meeting planner at the Fireman's Fund Insurance Company, a major insurance corporation. I accepted, and they hired me to create a consolidated meeting operation," Kliman recalls. "A neophyte hotel salesperson comes to a behemoth of an insurance company, and I've got just six months to consolidate their meetings. There were two hundred people who were planning meetings at that point, and they were reluctant to relinquish control. They were going on fam trips and having a good time, and I had to make a professional organization of these ad hoc players."
Fast forward to 12 years later, and Kliman was running a finely tuned meetings and travel operation that saved his company millions every year. "I had the best job in America: I was traveling the world, making good money, I was a leader in the industry, and by then I was reporting to the vice president of corporate administration, the senior administrative officer in the company." When Kliman's supervisor left the company, he asked for his boss' job, and got it. "And all of a sudden," he says, "I'm in charge of a diverse portfolio of communication and administrative services: corporate real estate, and fleet operations, and corporate communications, and public relations, and printing."
Kliman had a successful six-year stint as the Fireman Fund's top-ranking administrative officer, with a direct reporting relationship with the company's leadership. He left just shy of completing his second decade of service.
"The most important thing I learned was I needed to communicate with senior executives on their level. I needed to understand the fundamentals of what made my company tick," he relates. "Once I could do that I became credible. That showed that I knew what I was talking about. Meetings were a critical component of the organization's overall success story."
Executives want planners to develop skills beyond traditional meeting skills, says Terri Breining, president of San Diego-based planning firm Concepts Worldwide, and new chairwoman of Dallas-based Meetings Professionals International (MPI). "They need expertise in finance, marketing, and leadership. Skills that have not been included in Meeting Planning 101." These theories are at the core of MPI's strategic plan for the coming year, which aims to add executive-level skills to planners' portfolios.
"Historically we have used the language of the meeting planners: group specs, badges, and all of those things," Breining explains. "We have not done a good job in communicating to senior executives in their language, which is business terminology, not meeting terminology." Once you learn what your executives want to hear, you might become an executive yourself.