Time for an Effective Meeting Intervention

If the last meeting you went to sucked badly, you are in good company.  A survey of over 1000 North American managers indicated that on average they spend about 17 hours per week in meetings.  Of that considerable portion of their work-week, they deemed that one-third of that time was wasted.

The economic implications of this are staggering.  If you multiply 6 hours times the hourly rate of those managers times the number of managers in the economy, you begin to see a number with a whole bunch of zeros behind it.  Even in your own organization this calculation could easily total in the millions of dollars every year.

More selfishly, ask yourself what you would do if you had an extra six hours every week.  Could you work more reasonable hours?  Perhaps you could get to those things you know are important but are constantly displaced by the urgent.

This got us to ask the question, “if meetings are systemically bad, and they cost that much what can be done?”

First of all, do not accept that meetings have to be bad.  We all seem resigned that we have to write-off a significant portion of our week to something we know is useless.  Demand more of yourself, and of your organization.

Second – be part of the solution.  This is your problem to solve.  Even if you do not chair the meeting, you can raise questions as to how effective they are.  Your complacency will get you into more pointless meetings.

Third – insist on a structure.  The engineers and accountants always get a bad rap for being anal retentive.  While you may want to avoid such people at cocktail parties, invite them to help fix your meetings.  A bit of discipline will exponentially improve the value of your meetings.

Finally – figure out what meetings are costing you.  What is the cost to the organization by the time they pay a fully burdened labour cost.  What is the cost to you if meetings are causing you to work longer hours and give up your leisure time.  Profit-driven organizations are usually good a containing costs when they have to.  Get them to contain the cost of their meetings.

Then you’ll have more time to read our blog, and download YouTube clips.  Here’s one from John Cleese – for those who love British humour.

Job Descriptions — Probably Poorly Done, Almost Certainly Useless

Do you have a job description?  Have you seen it since you were hired into your current position?  Does it bear any resemblance to what you actually do every day?  If you answered “Yes” to any of these questions (much less all 3 of them), you are in the minority.  Most organizations either don’t have job descriptions, or have ones that are useless.

There is a good argument to be made that job descriptions are a relic from a time gone by, and that many jobs defy a linear description that is normally seen on a job description.  I would argue that the majority of jobs can, and should have job descriptions, but not in the way they are normally done.

If your job description articulates in painstaking detail the activities that you will undertake on a “normal” day, then it officially sucks.  Sorry to be the one to bring it up but:

a)    Nobody cares how busy you are.

b)   Nobody cares what you do.

Of course there are some highly bureaucratic organizations (often governmental organizations) where they do care about these things, but they are the minority.

Well run organizations care what you get done.  What did you produce?  What are your results?  How much value did you create?  A good job description will articulate these things – not how many paper clips you will use to file a report.

So I’m drawing a line in the sand today – Job Descriptions are dead.  Throw them away.  In their place, we will create POSTION OUTCOMES DESCRIPTIONS (PODs).   This is not a directive to the HR people out there – they are usually the last to come on board with such changes.  This is to every person who wants to make a difference.   A well-written POD will facilitate you making a difference at your job.

Write yours today, and get your boss to sign-off on it.  Then, when the crap-tasks start sliding across your desk, you have some mechanism by which to question it.  In your old Job Description, the crap-task would have fallen under “other duties as assigned”.

Now do you see why you need to do this?  There are lots of tools on the Wily Manager website to help you with this.  Join the revolution – and let us know how you’re making out.

Want a High Performance Team? Ditch Your Star

Many moons ago, I was a teenage university student, paying my tuition by working the graveyard shift at a grocery store.  One of the prime motivators of continuing to study hard year after year was so that I wouldn’t have to continue to work the graveyard shift at a grocery store.

Now that a few decades have elapsed, I have come to realize and appreciate the true value of this experience.  When we have assisted clients to implement high performance teams, I am often asked if I have ever been on one of those very special teams.  Then I tell the story about being on night-crew during university….

Interestingly, people are always trying to draw the connection between high-performing individuals and high performance teams.  When I tell people the link is not as strong as they might like to think, I am often greeted with confusion.

Here’s an ugly little truth:  Your star employees are often high-maintenance, and may do more long term damage than good.  Everyone knows the employee who can crank out the results, but leaves a wake of broken relationships and collateral damage behind.  She may produce a superior level of output for some period of time, but may adversely affect the output of others.

High Performance Teams exist where the interactions between team members are exceptionally functional.  A High Performance Team quite likely doesn’t have any stars, but rather group of competent performers who have found their groove in working together.   The success of your organization depends upon the number and quality of these B-players.

Back in the 1980s, in the middle of the night at a high-volume grocery retailer, our little team had no stars.  It was a group of guys who liked working together, had a very clear idea of what they were supposed to be doing, and relentless peer pressure to get things done properly.  Our output was almost double that of any comparable crew – and we had way more fun too.

The prescription for a High Performance Team is easy to understand.  Filling that prescription is much more difficult.

Getting Ahead

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There are 5 steps to getting ahead at work:

Step One: Figure out what you want

  • Following your ego is usually a bad idea
  • Don’t do it for the money

Step Two: Make a plan

  • What are the intermediate steps?
  • Don’t be linear
  • Take control – no one else is in charge of your career
  • Manage your reputation

Step Three: Reach out to people

  • Network
  • Ask for Feedback
  • Volunteer for high-profile projects
  • Get outside your silo
  • Network outside your organization
  • Keep your boss in the loop as much as possible

Step Four: Beware of others who may want to keep you where you are

  • If you’re generating results, they’ll want to keep you there
  • Talent hoarding is a real problem
  • Never trust anyone in HR
  • You need to be in charge of your career

Step Five: Help others

  • Karma
  • Delegate lots
  • Be a teacher
  • Build great teams around you

Get Instant Access to 200+ Cheat Sheets, Videos, and Other Immediately Usable Tools for Busy Managers – Try Out a Wily Manager Membership Today!

Getting Ahead

Learn the 5 steps to getting ahead at work.

Listen to the ‘Getting Ahead’ podcast:

: Download Podcast (MP3)

Getting Ahead Podcast Slides

Take a look at the ‘Getting Ahead’ Cheat Sheet

Micro-Managing: A Great Way to Get Fired

OK – we’ve all done it.  Decided to do something ourselves because its easier and faster than holding the appropriate person to account.  Maybe you’ve even done it with your children.  Micro-managing – the gift that keeps on destroying.

Every manager has been warned against this, so let’s look at why it happens, given the most common excuses most managers give for doing so:

It’s faster to do it myself.  It probably is faster… the first time.  But if you look at the amount of time it will take you to teach or correct someone else in the execution of a task, versus the amount of time it will take you to do it on an ongoing basis, the answer is clear.

I can do it better. You probably can… for a while.  However, if you insist on doing every individual task yourself, you will become quickly overwhelmed, and will end up doing some (high) proportion of those tasks poorly.

My people aren’t capable. If this is the case for any amount of time, you are clearly not doing your job as a manager.  It is your job to develop people.  Occasionally you truly don’t have the right talent, in which case you have to make changes to your talent bench.

I need to keep close to the details. Actually, you probably don’t.  As a manager, it is not your job to be expert at everything.  It’s your job to create experts, and be able to ask some semi-intelligent questions of them.

If I don’t do all these tasks, I won’t be useful anymore. Listen to yourself.  If you’re that insecure in your role as a leader, you need to examine whether you should be in a management role at all.

The bottom line is that micro-managers sap the productivity out of organizations by failing to capture the discretionary effort of their employees.  They don’t develop people, which is a primary function of a leader.  They also limit their own career mobility by trying to make themselves indispensible in the role they are in.

Micro-management is a self-destructive behaviour, and a great way to get fired.  Then you’ll have lot’s of time.

The Results-Oriented Work Environment (ROWE)

Apparently the most recent flavour of the month is the Results-Oriented Work Environment or ROWE for those who prefer to only work with acronyms.  It a great name because how could anyone not want a more results-oriented work place?  Some of its detractors call it something different – anarchy.  I would probably call it self-employment.

ROWE, in its most current incarnation, was pioneered at Best Buy, and is in use at other high profile companies such as IBM and Netflix.  The theory is a simple one:  employees set their own time, schedules, and work methods, and are instead measured on the output of what they produce.  In theory, it sounds like an excellent idea, and in certain cases it could probably work very well.

I can think of a two situations where it really wouldn’t work:

  1. It can’t work where there’s a high degree of inter-dependence with other stakeholders.  As a refugee of the Retail Food Industry, I can say without reservation that it would be a disaster if employees wrote their own schedule.  As great as it would be for the bulk of employees to work banker’s hours, it would get pretty frustrating for customers who predominantly shop at nights and on weekends.
  2. It can’t work in situations where it is difficult to measure the output of employee effort.  If there is any degree of variation in work processes, then the measurement thereby becomes very difficult.  For example, any profession with case-work (lawyers, social workers, insurance etc.) are inherently difficult to measure.  Some cases may be easily wrapped up in a few minutes, while others may require weeks of research and follow up.

I know we’re all supposed to buy-in to the myth that any and all things are measurable, but the luxury of believing that falls only to academics who have never had to actually measure anything.  Ask a professor how to measure teaching effectiveness, and watch her face as she looks like your dog when you pretend to throw the ball and then hide it behind your back.

The second group of people who insist that all things are measureable are management consultants – who, (for the low cost of $5000/day plus expenses) are more than willing to help you measure everything in your business.  Unlike the professors, these folks don’t believe it, but they make good money convincing organizations to try it.

Should you try to better focus your organization on results?  Yes – that’s your job as a manager.

Should you impose measurement systems on everything?  Maybe – it depends on your business, and how meaningful you can make your metrics.  Where possible, you should measure and evaluate people mostly on their output.

Should you set people loose and tell them as long as they produce X widgets in a given week, they can do whatever they want?  I think that’s a recipe for disaster for employee morale, risk management, and true accountability.

Of course, that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong (with thanks to Dennis Miller).

Time and Priority Management

Learn key ways to improve your time and priority management, including 10 things you can do right now.

Listen to the ‘Time and Priority Management’ Podcast:

: Download Podcast (MP3)

Time and Priority Management Podcast Slides

Take a look at the Time and Priority Management Cheat Sheet.

Help! I’m a Micro-Manager

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What’s Wrong With Being a Micro-Manager?

  • You are creating unnecessary work for yourself and others, and therefore wasting resources
  • You could be negatively affecting turnover
  • You are destroying discretionary effort and thereby reducing productivity
  • You will burn yourself and others out

How People Become Micro-Managers

  • They were great individual contributors, but never transitioned to being a leader
  • They have perfectionist tendencies
  • They are insecure in their role as a leader
  • They are control-freaks

How do I Address This?

1. Clearly Define Expectations

  • Put written performance agreements in place
  • Define the boundaries of people’s jobs and determine what level of authority they can have

2. Experiment With Giving People More Authority

  • Define outcomes; allow people to determine methods
  • Start small if necessary
  • Ask for progress reports

3. Leadership Development

  • Find ways to improve your ability as a leader.
  • Dedicate time to focus on leadership issues as opposed to the detail or the work

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Your Smart Phone Could Get You Fired

There’s lots of media coverage this week of smart phones – iPhone for the continuing saga of the iPhone 4, and Blackberry for the UAE’s refusal to use them based on security concerns.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should come-clean now on the fact that I came late to the smart phone party.  I had a perfectly good cell phone, and no one was able to convince me that a smart phone would make my life any easier.  In fact – quite the opposite:

“You need a smart phone so you can get your email anywhere, and always be connected.  The only thing I don’t like is that my phone reception is not very good.”

Sorry – that’s at least two strikes against the smart phone

1)   I don’t want to always be connected.  In fact I look to actively be disconnected

2)   Why would I buy a phone with the limiting function being the telephone itself?  It might make a mean frappuccino, but I would prefer it to make phone calls.

I finally relented and bought an iPhone because it effectively condensed four devices I regularly carried on business trips into one (phone, iPod, Palm Pilot & GPS).  The bonus feature was that as a middle-aged white guy, I instantly felt cooler with a gadget from Apple.

So once I had the new smart phone was I perpetually connected, as I feared?  No.

Not because the technology limited me in any way from staying connected, but because I often either ignored it or turned it off.  I am able to do so because I’m not part of a big corporate food-chain where I would be lead to believe that my very existence on the planet is contingent upon me being absolutely indispensible to my employer.

As a contractor of services, I am generally exempt from things like anxiety about job security (because I don’t have any).  But it got me thinking about why people feel they need to be connected all the time.  It is nothing more than illusions of grandeur if you think that no one else can do what you do.  If you are one of the few that has made yourself indispensible then your business is not sustainable, and we should probably fire you anyway.

Either way, if you’re one of those managers that is constantly connected to your workplace, you should work to wean yourself off this addiction.  Work, like all other recreational drugs, should be used only in moderation.

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