NELSON =THE MANAGEMENT BIBLE=

212	THE MANAGEMENT BIBLE

2.A new emphasis on managing business processes rather than functional departments.

3.The evolution of information technology to the point where knowledge, accountability, and results can be distributed rapidly anywhere in the organization.

In each of these three forces, communication and information technology plays key roles. The effective design, management, and implementation of new technologies are therefore a critical factor in the competitiveness and long-term success of today’s organizations.

Information, however, is notoriously difficult to manage. According to Peter Drucker in Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

(New York: Harper & Row, 1974): “Information activities present a special organizational problem. Unlike most other result-producing activities, they are not concerned with one stage of the process but with the entire process itself. This means that they have to be both centralized and decentralized.”

The better and more effective use of information technology enables organizations to rely more on teams to make decisions and less on individual supervisors and managers—leading to reductions in the numbers of supervisors and managers required to staff specific departments and functions. These reductions often lead to dramatic cost savings which flow directly to the company’s bottom line.

For those managers who remain, new skills are required to become coaches, supporters, and facilitators of self-managing teams of front-line employees. Instead of trying to control the organization, managers and supervisors find themselves in a new job: to inspire workers instead of commanding them. By doing so, they can have a major impact on the effectiveness and long-term success of their organizations, while encouraging employees at all levels of the organization to grow and to mature in their new roles as team leaders and decision makers.

TEAM LING - LIVE, INFORMATIVE, NON-COST AND GENUINE !

BUILDING HIGH-PERFORMANCE ORGANIZATIONS

213

P O P Q U I Z !

Being a manager today requires more than a casual acquaintance with human behavior and how to create an environment that will encourage and allow your employees to give their very best at all times. Reflect for a few moments on what you have learned in this chapter; then ask yourself the following questions:

1.To what extent do you rely on teams to get things done in your organization?

2.Are team members in your organization committed? If not, why not? What could be done to improve teams and effective teamwork?

3.What are your strengths in working with and being a part of a team? What are your weaknesses?

4.In what ways do you empower teams, giving them the authority and autonomy they need to get their jobs done? What more could you do?

5.How do you track the results of teams in your organization and hold them accountable for their results?

TEAM LING - LIVE, INFORMATIVE, NON-COST AND GENUINE !

TEAM LING - LIVE, INFORMATIVE, NON-COST AND GENUINE !

C H A P T E R 1 3

V

Making Meetings

More Effective

IT’S A NEW WORLD OUT THERE . . .

Meetings and . . .

How they enable teams to get work done.

Getting the most out of meetings.

Understanding common meeting problems—and their fixes. Improving your meetings.

215

TEAM LING - LIVE, INFORMATIVE, NON-COST AND GENUINE !

TEAM LING - LIVE, INFORMATIVE, NON-COST AND GENUINE !

BUILDING HIGH-PERFORMANCE ORGANIZATIONS

217

MEETINGS PUT TEAMS TO WORK

Meetings are the primary forum in which groups conduct business and communicate with one another. With the proliferation of teams in business today, it pays to master the basic skills of meeting management.

Teams are clearly an idea whose time has come. As organizations continue to flatten their hierarchies and empower front-line workers with more responsibility and authority, teams are the visible and often inevitable result. Consider how one of the best companies runs meetings to respond to this new, team-oriented business environment.

•Say what you will about Jack Welch, former chairman of General Electric (GE), he is one of the most effective and successful managers in the history of American business. Part of his success was a direct result of moving his company away from the old-style autocratic leadership model and toward a new model of participative management based on teams. This new leadership model required a new model of meetings, called work out meetings, which bring workers and managers together in open forums where workers are allowed to ask any question they want and managers are required to respond.

•The results of Welch’s influence can be observed at GE’s Bayamón, Puerto Rico, lightning arrester plant, where employees have been organized into self-managing, cross-functional teams that are responsible for specific plant functions—shipping, assembly, and so forth—comprising employees from all parts of the plant. As a result, when a team discusses changes that need to be made in their operations, employees from throughout the organization will be a part of the discussion and decision-making process, tearing down the organizational silos that often get in the way of communication. In addition, hourly workers run the meetings on

TEAM LING - LIVE, INFORMATIVE, NON-COST AND GENUINE !

218	THE MANAGEMENT BIBLE

their own, while advisors—GE’s term for salaried employees— participate only at the team’s request.

While considered an experiment, Bayamón produced clear and convincing evidence that GE’s approach was quite successful. A year after startup, the plant’s employees measured 20 percent higher in productivity than their closest counterpart in the mainland United States. Not only that, but management projected a further 20 percent increase in the following year.

Unfortunately, meetings in many organizations are at best a waste of time and at worst a severe detriment to efficiency and effectiveness. Poorly run meetings are routine; instead of contributing to an organization’s efficiency and effectiveness, most meetings make employees less efficient and less effective. When was the last time that you actually looked forward to participating in a meeting rather than trying to figure out some way to get out of it? But, let us make it as clear and unambiguous as we can: Every minute counts; it’s your job to ensure that the meetings you attend have value for the organization.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH MEETINGS?

What does your gut tell you about meetings in your organization? If your organization is like most organizations, the majority of meetings are a waste of time. Meeting experts have determined that approximately 53 percent of all the time spent in meetings is unproductive, worthless, and of little consequence. While this is bad news in itself, when you consider that most businesspeople spend at least 25 percent of their working hours in meetings, with upper management spending more than double that time in meetings, you can see that bad meetings are a real recipe for organizational disaster.

But why do so many meetings go so wrong, and is there something you can do to fix them within your organization? In our book Better

TEAM LING - LIVE, INFORMATIVE, NON-COST AND GENUINE !

BUILDING HIGH-PERFORMANCE ORGANIZATIONS

219

ASK BOB AND PETER: Do you know of any good training

?programs to help employees improve their public speaking skills?

Although there are a variety of programs available to help employees with their public speaking skills, you might consider the following: (1) Communispond is a business that specializes in preparing employees for speaking publicly and before one another. Bob once took a three-day class with Communispond and was impressed with its quality and effectiveness. Find them on the Web at www.communispond.com. (2) Joining Toastmasters International is a terrific and inexpensive way to learn how to become a better and more effective public speaker. The environment is low pressure and supportive, and chapters meet often—usually once a week. Check them out at www.toastmasters.org. (3) Many community colleges offer classes in public speaking. Contact one near you to find out what’s available.

Business Meetings (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), we discuss a few of the reasons:

•Too many meetings take place. It seems like someone in every organization is having a meeting almost every day for some reason or another, whether the topic of the meeting is important enough to merit it. The result? A lot of time spent in meetings and not so much time getting actual work done. It’s no surprise that many people find themselves thinking (often out loud), “How am I supposed to get any work done with all these meetings?”

•The meeting starts late. The tendency is to wait for those people who are late, especially if that includes your boss or someone of higher rank in the organization. Unfortunately, this wastes the time of all those who are waiting, essentially punishing them for being on time and rewarding those who were late, making it even easier for them (and others) to be late the next time as well.

TEAM LING - LIVE, INFORMATIVE, NON-COST AND GENUINE !

220	THE MANAGEMENT BIBLE

ASK BOB AND PETER: How different is it managing a

?business on the Internet compared to a regular business? Whereas the office provides a physical meeting

place, an Internet business is widespread with no physical meeting place.

You’ve noticed one of the most interesting nuances of managing people (i.e., in an office) versus managing them remotely (i.e., via the Internet). In a regular office environment, managers interact with their employees all the time. They sit in meetings with them, visit with them, talk with them in the hallway, listen to their stories of suc- cess—and failure—and, as a result, they often develop very strong working relationships with them. Unfortunately, when you manage remotely (through the Internet) you may go months without having time to form strong interpersonal bonds with your employees. And while you can certainly work with and manage employees via e-mail, phone calls, faxes, and the like, it’s not the same as being in the same room with them. The solution to this is to be sure that time and money are set aside for the employees of the organization to meet with their managers and coworkers on a periodic basis, typically a minimum of once every two weeks. These meetings should focus on giving managers and employees the opportunity to meet one another and participate in team-building exercises that require them to work together to achieve certain goals. You might, for example, have a monthly marketing strategy meeting or a quarterly business planning meeting. The choice depends on what kind of meeting meets your needs and the needs of your organization. By creating opportunities for managers and employees to work together to achieve common goals, developing strong interpersonal bonds and relationships, whether the business is run over the Internet or not, you will help employees achieve their goals and, thus, the goals of the organization.

TEAM LING - LIVE, INFORMATIVE, NON-COST AND GENUINE !

BUILDING HIGH-PERFORMANCE ORGANIZATIONS

221

•The meeting has no focus. Does every meeting you attend have an agenda and a clear plan for getting from the beginning to the end? If you answered “yes,” then we would be very surprised indeed. Most often, meetings are a proliferation of personal agendas, digressions, diversions, off-topic tangents, and worse. These results all serve to throw meetings out of focus, off track, and into the annals of countless other worthless wastes of time.

•Attendees are unprepared. Often individuals come unprepared and may not even know why they’ve been invited to attend. This means that precious time is wasted either bringing all the attendees up to speed on the issues, or attendees simply mentally check out of the meeting, imagining all the things they could be doing with the time they are wasting in the meeting!

•Certain individuals dominate the proceedings. It seems that there’s always someone in a meeting (in large meetings, more than one person) who decides to be the star of the show and to make his or her points as loudly and as often as possible. Aside from their obnoxious behavior, the problem is that these individuals often intimidate the other participants and stifle their contributions—not the outcome you need to accomplish the goals of the meeting.

•The meeting lasts too long. Rather than let the participants leave after the business at hand is completed, most meeting leaders allow meetings to expand to fill the time allotted to them. The result is that meetings often drag on and on and on—well past the time when they have stopped being productive.

THE EIGHT KEYS TO GREAT MEETINGS

Although many meetings are a big waste of time, they don’t have to be. The cure is readily available and inexpensive and can be easy to implement. Here’s what we’ve found to be the most useful advice for having more effective meetings:

TEAM LING - LIVE, INFORMATIVE, NON-COST AND GENUINE !