Good meetings are one of the simplest things you can do to improve morale and get the best results from groups.  Yet people still consistently get meetings wrong.  Worse yet, people accept bad meeting form because the meeting leader has “been so busy” or “doing so many other things well”.    

But, think of the example that sets – it perpetuates the problem.  You teach each other that bad meeting behaviour is acceptable…that wasting each other’s time is acceptable.  The meeting I attended included at least 5 contract employees – some of whom had travelled across town to be there.  These people are being paid by the hour to watch someone else mismanage their time.

If you are guilty of sloppy meeting form, the solution might be as simple as getting a better system.  Here is mine (thanks to Franklin Covey, which is where I learned it):

1. A paper diary.   Did she say paper?  Yep, that’s right.  I love my gizmos and gadgets, but when it comes to meetings, I believe in paper.  Think about it…taking notes on paper shows that you are listening (it also reduces the temptation to check emails during the boring bits).  My paper diary has the following sections:  A month-at-a-glance calendar; a page-a-day section; and a set of tabs in the back with plenty of notes pages – one for each project I am working on and each person who reports to me
2. The big picture. I document every meeting in the month-at-a-glance section.  Yes, this is duplicating my online calendar, but it’s worth it to be able to see my free time across days…not just hour by hour.  This way I have a visual sense of which days and times are going to be my most productive. I can plan to make the best use of those times. (And, if all of my meetings don’t fit  in the little boxes, I know it’s time to question how I am  spending my  time).
3. The detail – My paper diary comes with me to every meeting, both in the office and out.  When I hear something useful –  I write it on today’s page.  When I commit to do something, I write it on the todo list.  When I hear something important to a project or a person, I write it behind that tab. Then, I make a point to share it at the next meeting with him/her/them.  (People really appreciate the flow of information.  Can you see how powerful that would be?)

Then, there is just one more thing to bring it all together…once  you are organised, make yourself a standard meeting agenda to use during each meeting.  It should go something like this.

• Remind everyone why you are meeting and the relevance to their role/project etc
• List the things you hope to talk about/accomplish in the time allotted.  If you have a white board, write them there so people can follow along
• Ask the participants if there is anything else – add the additions to the list
• Agree on time for each topic
• Follow agenda
• Wrap up 5 minutes early
• Remind people of their commitments before the next meeting and write these down so they get reviewed next time (hint:  if all of the tasks are assigned to you, you are doing something wrong).

Ok, I can hear you out there saying ‘that will take too long’.  If that’s you, I challenge you to spend a week observing how much time is wasted while sitting in meetings.  Don’t forget to add the time you spend backtracking, jumping between topics, and re-visiting the same issues the following week because no one remembered their actions.   Maybe those 1.5 hour meetings could actually be shaved to an hour?  Maybe everyone in the room could be using that extra 30 minutes on helping a customer or developing a new idea?

When a company consistently demonstrates good meeting form, they find that meetings actually run shorter.   People become more accountable and also more engaged.  Good meeting form builds trust in the communication process.  People even stop hijacking meetings for their own agendas.  Now, wouldn’t THAT be nice?

For the sake of a productive 2011, I challenge you to ask yourself…‘how’s my meeting form?’

A professor stands in front of his class.  On the desk, sits a jar and a pile of rocks.  He asks a student to fill the jar with as many rocks as possible until it is full.  When the student finishes, the professor asks the class if the jar is full and they all say ‘yes’.  The professor presents a pitcher of sand.  He pours the sand into the jar and it fills the space around the rocks.  He asks the class again if the jar is full.  They exclaim ‘yes’.  He then takes a pitcher of water and pours it into the jar until it begins to spill over the top.  Now the jar is full. 

The lesson is that there is often more room in the jar than you think, but only if you put the big rocks in first. 

For the last 6 months, I have been extremely busy – a bit over-committed with client work.  As good as that is for my bank account, I know it’s not really a sustainable business model.  I have been so busy delivering, I haven’t really made time for business building.  So, last week I allocated time for big rocks – 4 hours per day working on my list:

1)      Begin design on that new client training/coaching program I’ve been meaning to do

2)      2011 financial planning and set up of systems and files

3)      Re-write  that research paper I did into a more usable white paper for my audience

4)      Mindmap/outline the Flying Solo Live talk for September

5)      Create a schedule and library of future blog posts

Over the week, I was able to make significant progress on items 1, 2, and 3 and make a good start on 4 and 5.  It’s not as much as I had hoped to achieve, but it’s significantly more than I’ve achieved in the last 6 months. 

But, I can’t do that every week.  So, how I will I sustain it?  Clearly, these tasks have to go in the jar first.  Each of these tasks required significant head space just to make a start.  They can’t be squeezed in between client work or meetings.  For my business, that means being more careful with my time:

• Set an appointment in my diary for this work.  Treat it with the same respect and attention that I would give a client
• Keep a prioritised list of ‘big rocks’ to tick off the list – aim for 1 per week.  That could be 50 per year!
• Remove distractions – no email, phone calls, or Twitter while working on the big rocks
• Get moving  -  If I get stuck on something, don’t turn to the internet for a distraction…get moving!  45 minutes of walking time is great for new ideas

Hypothesis:  Chefs given the advantage should perform better than those with none.

Actual result:   2 out of 3 chefs with advantage performed worse than those without any preparation or planning time.

Welcome to the unpredictable nature of human beings and performance.    Welcome to management lessons from Masterchef Australia*. 

According to Alvin, who was eliminated from the competition on Monday night, “I had an advantage, but cooking is a whole different story”.

Ralph Stacey** would agree.  Cooking requires innovation and innovation cannot be planned in advance.  Innovation occurs in the moment and in reaction to the conditions of that moment.  The task of cooking Adriano Zumbo’s amazing V8 cake contains too many unpredictable elements for the planning time to be an actual advantage.

So what kind of planning could Alvin have done?  Peter Senge*** would suggest to focus on the conditions for success by carrying on a learning conversation with the self –

• use the planning time to imagine the self creating the cake – what are the positive and negative thoughts that occur?  Examine them and address them honestly.
• be curious about how the brain is thinking about the task and try to create an internal picture of the future that the self believes
• give the brain space and permission to learn in the moment instead of panic - practise mindfulness by observing the thoughts without becoming the thoughts

These are some of the same skills our wise leaders are trying to learn for the same reason – the ability to think and react innovatively when things are not going to plan.

It’s not that planning is not important or useful – just make sure you are matching your level of planning to the nature of the task.

*Not watching Masterchef?  This short video will help: http://www.masterchef.com.au/video.htm?channel=S2MCLastSupper&clipId=2729_822MC200710CR”

** Stacey, R. D. (1996).  Strategic management and organisational dynamics (Second ed.), London.  Pitman Publishing.

*** Senge, P. (1990).  The fifth discipline:  The art & practice of the learning organization.  New York:  Currency Doubleday.

Let’s say that you have asked someone for a recommendation on changing the venue for your next conference.  She has put forward 2 alternatives and her recommendation and is now awaiting your decision.  It’s been 2 weeks.   Domino 1: The venue gets booked by someone else.  Domino 2: the rates start to go up.  Domino 3:  The event invitation is delayed and registrations suffer.

But the costs actually go deeper than that.  Domino 4:  People stop working on the conference and turn to other projects in the interim.  If you continue to wait to make a decision until the last minute – when it absolutely has to be made – it now has urgency.  Once you make your decision, everyone will have to stop what they are doing and start on the conference work again.

Tom DeMarco’s book ‘Slack’ quantifies the cost of switching between tasks as not only the mechanics of moving to a new task, but also:

Rework due to inopportune abort + loss of immersion time + loss of team binding effects = 15% penalty

In other words, each interruption comes at a cost.  By waiting until the last minute, you create both urgency and interruption for the people around you.

But I think there is another domino missing to DeMarco’s equation:  Learning.    

Each decision you make is an output for which evaluation and learning are inputs to your organisation.  Accelerated decision making increases the outputs, which, in turn, increase the inputs*.  Things get moving and your organisation gets smarter faster.

So, how do you create a culture that accelerates decisions? 

1. Be willing to experiment by making decisions even if you don’t have all of the answers
2. Establish guiding principles  – Don’t punish people for making a ‘bad’ decision and don’t reward people for hard work that resulted from last-minute decisions
3. Focus on communication and information flow that encourages evaluation and learning
4. Spend more time talking about ‘what’ you are trying to achieve and less on ‘how’ you want it done . 
5. Empower decisions to be made as close to the problem as possible – not just at the top. 

Now, take another look around your desk.  Are you creating a domino effect?  If there are decisions to be made – make them.    Even the wrong decision could be less costly than no decision at all.

* Webb, P. J. (2006). Inspirational Chaos: Executive Coaching and Tolerance of Complexity. In M. Cavanagh, A. M. Grant & T. Kemp (Eds.), Evidence-based Coaching. Theory, research and practice from the behavioural sciences. (Vol. 1, pp. 83-95). Bowen Hills: Australian Academic Press.

Do you recognise this pattern? You need to make a change.  You make a plan and a schedule.  But when you start to move forward, you go…well, backward.

Welcome to the complex and unpredictable world of change – the inevitable consequence of managing in a world of choice.  It is happening around us all of the time, but the most recent lesson I learned in management came from trying to manage my cat.

In October, Starksy (pictured) was diagnosed with diabetes and prescribed special food and medicine.  He now requires an injection of insulin each day at 7:30 AM and 7:30 PM, immediately after food.  That should be easy enough, I thought.  And, I changed my schedule and his.

But, when I tried to implement the changes, Starsky objected.  He following me around the house from 6:00 PM and meowing relentlessly – unable to understand why I was withholding his food.  When 7:30 finally rolled around, I would finally put the food down.  But, instead of eating, he would just walk away.  Since food is required before injections, now I couldn’t give him his scheduled shot.    When I tried to force him to eat the food he had been insisting on just 10 minutes prior, he refused and wanted to go outside instead.

My plan and schedule had gone horribly wrong.  Managing a cat was proving just as complex as managing humans.

In my August blog on Leadership, I explained managing complexity like this: 

Traditional command and control models of leadership were better suited to managing in an industrial age – predictable, orderly structures, like machines and factories.  But it’s not the machines doing the work anymore, it is people.  And, it’s not a product we are producing, it is innovation and knowledge.  And once you rely on people to produce innovation, things get considerably more complex.  Management skills of planning, scheduling and delegating are second to those of visioning, boundary setting, empowerment and communication.

Management theory is all well and good, but does it actually work in practise?  Well, here is how I used it with Starsky:

What’s happening?

Starsky, like our employees, is applying choice. The more I try to control him, the more unpredictable he becomes.  We are interdependent – for every behaviour I try to change, he exhibits a response – often an unpredictable and undesired one.

The alternative

The secret to getting control of the situation was actually to stop trying to control it at all and focus instead on boundaries and empowerment.  Now, Starsky can have his food any time after 6:30.  I don’t stand over him with a needle waiting for him to finish eating.  If he wants to go outside, I let him because I know that he will be back within the hour to finish his dinner.

The result

As soon as I relaxed my standards of control and empowered Starsky with more choice, we both started getting what we wanted. 

My Advice

If your projects aren’t getting the results you intend, try changing your focus.  Spend less energy on the schedule and more on the enabling the desired outcomes through boundary setting, vision setting, communications and empowerment.

Let’s say your team has a goal to produce and execute a marketing plan.  In fact, your goal is to write the best darn marketing plan the organisation has ever seen.  Since the plan has various sections that need to be researched and written, it can be broken down into parts and assigned to various team members.  But wait…is that really the best way to create a stellar marketing plan?

How you structure the work depends on what you are trying to accomplish.  Doing marketing as a team is not like painting a house.  If you just all go off and do your own sections, you won’t benefit from the collective experience and ideas within the team.  A key benefit of teams is that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.    The best ideas for your marketing  will likely emerge from the creative process.  To benefit from that emergence, you need to make yourselves more interdependent - in other words, how you work together as a team will impact the marketing plan that emerges.

So, before you jump into the details, take some time to get to know each others’ backgrounds and working styles.   If the task is important to you, take the time to talk about individual and shared motivations.  New research has shown that teams with well-articulated charters and performance strategies create initial conditions that foster the emergence of team success*.

But, you might be thinking… is it even worth it?  Not everyone likes these ‘getting to know you’ activities and there is something to be said for ’if you want something done right, do it yourself’.  Is there really any benefit to working in a team?  Well, that depends on what the goal is – more on that in next week’s post.

 *Mathieu, J.E. and Rapp, T.L. (2009).  Laying the Foundations for Successful Team Performance Trajectories:  The Roles of Team Charters and Performance Strategies.  Journal of Applied Psychology. Vol.94, No.1. 90-103

http://blogs.bnetau.com.au/aussierules/2009/10/11/making-goals-work-btalk-australia/

Are you happy about the way goals are set and tracked in your business? In large companies it’s often a HR driven process that is carried out once a year, used as a tool for appraisals, and bears little relation to what occupies people day to day.

On today’s BTalk Australia Phil Dobbie talks to Janet Horton, the founder of Handspring Consulting…it all begins with setting goals that the employee actually wants to do.

The technician is usually the one who gets you into business in the first place – you take the stuff you love and turn it into what you do.  But, the business also requires an entrepreneur…a visionary who will dream and scheme to create new things and a manager who will create order. 

In larger businesses, these roles are done by 3 separate people and there is a natural tension that exists between them that pushes the business forward.  But businesses that are small in size and young in age often do not have the luxury of 3 different people to fill these roles.  This means that you tend to gravitate to your favourite role, which can lead to stagnation,  or active inertia (lots of activity without change), which can lead to burnout.

What’s the solution to all of this?  Gerber says that if you are going to make your business your life, then make sure it’s the one you want.  Here is what you need to do:

• Understand your goals and motivations:  what specifically do you want to achieve and what would it mean to achieve it? 
• Define your organisational strategy:  what will this organisation look like when it grows?
• Define your management strategy:  By what metrics will I measure the organisation?  (cash flow, sales pipeline, etc)
• Define your people strategy:  How will I select and motivate them?
• Define your market strategy:  Who are your customers and why will they choose to do business with you over the alternatives?
• Define your systems strategy:  How will the work get done?  Don’t manage the business in your head.  Document how things get done so that others can step into roles as you grow.  Pretend it is a business that will be franchised, even if it isn’t.  That will make what you do repeatable and predictable.

Sound hard?  Well it is and it isn’t.  The hardest part is finding the time and head space to work on the business instead of in the business.  And if you want to reach your goals faster, try using some outside assistance.  Read about Two Heads Business Advisory Board services here.  

*Gerber, M. E., (1995).  The E-Myth Revisited:  why most small business don’t work and what to do about it.  Harper Collins, New York, NY. 

1. Quarterly comprehensive strategy – the opportunity to step away from the daily and weekly issues that tend to occupy most of our attention and take a holistic view of the business
2. Monthly strategic – the time to review ‘parking lot’ items that have come up in weekly tactical meetings and wrestle with and decide on the critical issues.
3. Weekly tactical – resolve issues, remove obstacles, and ensure everyone is on the same page
4. Daily check in – wait…don’t panic!  This is only 5 minutes per day and it will save you heaps on time in the rest of your day because you will coordinate schedules and cut down on email chains

I actually had the opportunity to implement this in my own organisation once, and I can say…it really worked.  Some people will object with ‘it’s too many meetings’.  But, as Lencioni points out, if you add up the hours your management team spends leaving voice mail, roaming the halls to clarify issues, and the lag time of staff waiting for clarity, the methodology suddenly doesn’t seem quite as overwhelming.  Doing meetings right is about getting it right the first time so everyone can get on with the business at hand. 

Tips for success:

1. Daily:  don’t sit down, keep it administrative, hold it daily, regardless of travel schedules
2. Weekly:  don’t set an agenda.  Start with a lightning round where each manager gives an update and shares key metrics for 60 seconds.  Let the group set the agenda after the lightning round, based on what is most important.  Postpone strategic discussions until the monthly meeting
3. Monthly strategic:  Discuss, deal with and decide critical issues impacting long term success.  Do research prior and engage in ‘good conflict’
4. Quarterly off-site:  Don’t overstructure, but don’t turn it into a boondoogle either.  Consider using an outside facilitator

The book is written as a management fable, which sometimes feels a bit insulting to the intelligence.  But, it’s worth persevering.   We all know how frustrating and time-consuming un-productive meetings can be.  I can speak from personal experience – this is a powerful tool that can make a huge difference to productivity and job satisfaction.  Need help?  Give me a call.

*Lencioni, P. (2004).  Death by meeting.  San Francisco, CA:  Jossey-Bass.

Imagine yourself for a moment not as a leader or manager in your organisation… but as William Dawes – navigator responsible for 1000 convicts and crew of the First Fleet as it sailed from England to Australia.  Your goal is Australia, your plan is charted on the maps, and you monitor your progress using the ship’s clock, telescope, and a sky full of stars. 

Setting a goal without a monitoring plan is like pointing the ships toward the South West and hoping for the best.  Things rarely go to plan.  Success isn’t in the goal setting, it is in the monitoring. 

Yet, meaningful monitoring is often absent from our business objective discussions.  Busy leaders of organisations barely have time to construct meaningful goals for employees, much less worry about how they will be monitored.  Goals are distributed to employees and managers hope for the best.

If you are stretched for time, try setting fewer goals and spending more time on action and monitoring plans.  Make sure the monitoring is easy, timely, and motivating.  Most importantly, make it specific.  Where do we want to be?  By when?  How will we know?

Monitoring Julie and Joe…

Last week they both flagged the need for monitoring as part of their action plans.  Julie said she would review the kiosk usage results weekly and make adjustments.  Joe said we would provide weekly progress reports between now and September. 

Without good monitoring, you get updates that are subjective.  ‘Ran reports and distributed to local managers’.  ‘Spoke to 4 people about their company user-centred design processes.’    The information is meaningless because there is no monitoring plan for comparison.   

Julie’s goal is measurable – a 20% increase.  It should be easy for her to break down how she expects that 20% to materialise.  Will it be incremental?  Will certain behaviours (training, for example) drive demand for kiosks?  She plots her desired usage per week and creates a simple report comparing desired to actual usage, which can be distributed to each participating store.  Stores meeting their goal can share stories of success.  Stores not meeting their goals can make adjustments.  Julie can easily see where she needs to focus her attention.

Joe’s action plan is more subjective, but it can still be monitored.  He has already identified the content elements for the report he is writing.  Joe needs to publish a schedule for writing and researching the report –   Where will he get the data?  By when?  You get the idea.

It is easy in theory, but rarely done well in organisations.   It takes patience and a bit of time.  It also takes attention to detail.  Let’s face it…monitoring isn’t sexy.  Goals are sexy.  They are full of dreams and possibilities.  Success is sexy…it’s about celebration and recognition and accomplishment.  Monitoring plans are the stuff in between.  They are about execution.    Or, as a friend recently said to me ‘goal setting is like falling in love, execution is like caring for a baby’.

But, imagine if every person in your organisation successfully pursued and accomplished 1 big thing this year.  An organisation of 50 people would accomplish 50 big things.  How many did you accomplish last year?