:
rule four:

Do you ever get really tired of meetings that go on forever and seem to accomplish nothing? Was it clear to you the first time you went bowling that the goal was to knock those pins down? If a tree falls in the woods during your meetings, would it wake anyone up?

I’ve spent a lot of my working life going to meetings. The best meetings were great experiences. But many more were terrible wastes of time and energy.

Like cooking, meetings have a better chance of success if you know in advance what the end product should look like.

If you need to share a lot of important information with a lot of people, you probably need to put it in writing. If you think a meeting is necessary, make it short and sweet. Punch a few of the high points, pass out the details, and take down the tent. You don’t want to pass out the written materials at the beginning of the meeting. Your audience will be reading and rustling while you’re talking. You don’t want to open the floor for questions. They haven’t read the details yet.

Save the
Rainforests

I used to be annoyed by the airline attendants’ instructions prior to take-off. I didn’t get the part about the oxygen masks. They tell you that if the emergency masks drop down, put your mask on immediately. If you are traveling with infants or small children put your own mask on first, before you help the children with theirs.

Failing to take care of your needs as a manager will make it impossible for you to look after the needs of your staff or the needs of your boss.

Does that sound too autocratic for your style? You want to have an open discussion where everybody can participate? Great! But let’s look at what we have to do to make that work.

First let’s talk about the size of this meeting. My experience is that in a meeting of ten or twelve people, there are usually four or five who do most of the talking. Whereas in a group of twenty or thirty, there are usually four or five who do most of the talking. So maybe the ideal meeting size is four or five. Going over ten participants degrades the quality of the discussion.

Second, are we cooking something, are we deciding on the menu, or are we just letting each other know what sounds good? The person who called this meeting needs to know what the goal is. The person who called this meeting needs to let the participants know what the goal is.

That means, start with an agenda. Don’t have meetings without agendas. The agenda line needs to be specific. For example, "Provide Bob with some ideas for advanced features that would be valuable on the new workstations" could best be satisfied by a rambling, open-ended discussion.

An agenda line saying, "Decide which one of the five workstation configurations recommended by Bob should be used for our department" calls for a specific action.

All kinds of things can be tackled in meetings. Having a meeting for the purpose of venting frustration is okay. Having a meeting for the purpose of solving a communication or coordination problem with another department is okay. But you should know which one you are aiming for, before you sit down at the meeting.

And just as meetings need a clear goal if they are going to succeed, so do you and your department need clear goals.

John W. Gardner, author of the classic book Self-Renewal: The Individual and Innovative Society, captured the spirit of the learning person with his admonition "Don’t set out in life to be an interesting person; set out to be an interested person."

-- Jim Collins, co-author of Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, from "The Long View," Inc., August 1997.

Having some clearly stated goals is really helpful in making decisions. In order to decide which workstations to buy for the department, you’ll need to evaluate them in terms of their intended use. But that could still leave you with a half dozen or more options. Do you buy the fastest? The most reliable? The cheapest?

What are your goals? If you’ve been told you need to curb the growth of capital expenses, you’ll make a different choice than if the pressure has been to give speedier customer service. (Yeah, I know. You’ve been asked to do both and to reduce your computer repair expenses.)

You need to be careful about setting departmental goals. In fact, some business gurus recommend against them altogether.

Imagine the havoc that could be wrought by a credit and collections department whose goal was to drastically reduce bad debt write-offs. First, they would rigorously research every credit application with a fine-toothed comb. Then, they would deny credit to any potential customer who was ever late with a payment or who didn’t have a five-star credit rating. Then they’d sit back and watch those write-offs drop. Then they would watch sales plummet. The company’s goal is to sell its product at a profit. Make sure your goals are contributing to the company’s goal.

What are your organization’s goals? Odds are, whether your company has written goals or not, the goal is pretty simple: make money. The more, the better. If your company’s primary goal is truly "Make the world a better place," or "Provide a meaningful, rewarding livelihood for our employees," you don’t work at a typical company.

I’m not saying companies don’t try to contribute to their communities or try to make jobs rewarding. In some cases, these things are just designed to project an image or to retain valued employees. In most businesses, there is a real desire to do right by their employees and the community. But either way, if push comes to shove, making money is what it’s about.

Paperback

The Goal, Eli Goldratt’s business text disguised as a novel, is a study in focusing production resources on the goal of making money. Goldratt makes it clear that internal or interim goals may often be poorly thought out and counterproductive. A department graded on keeping a low cost per unit can be "successful" by fully utilizing its fixed assets. Run the machines around the clock. But if the efficiently produced widgets just become excess inventory, then the "savings" in the cost per unit are ultimately going to have a negative effect on the bottom line.

Is one of your interim goals to reduce costs by keeping parts inventory at the minimum level possible? But what happens when a promising new customer is signed up and you are asked to increase output overnight?

I have mixed feelings about the practice of setting individual annual goals for each staff member or even for teams. It’s like the old joke about six people stumbling upon an elephant in the dark and trying to draw a picture of it by adding up each individual’s limited knowledge of his or her assigned sector. Someone has got to have the big picture. The whole elephant, if you will.

And if the big picture is shared with everyone, then the supervisor in charge of the right front quadrant knows that her staff needs to stay in sync with the other three legs. Racing ahead or lagging behind is not productive. Crossing the finishing line on target wouldn’t be much of a victory without the other three legs.

Setting team and individual goals can be seen as saying, "Now don’t you worry about the big picture, just take care of your little corner."

Pressure to reach numeric goals in an assembly line setting has long been common practice. Technology has made it easier to measure the quantities produced by an ever-growing number of service sector workers. Pressure to constantly increase production can be degrading to employees, and destructive of employee health and morale, and can cause high employee turnover.

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And focusing on numbers takes attention away from quality. How important is quality to your customers?

How do you deal with the competing demands of quality versus quantity?

My answer is the same as my answer to many of these questions: Share information generously throughout the organization. The conflict is most successfully addressed by a workforce that is kept actively informed of company goals and strategies. If your niche in the market is high volume, low cost, you’re hands-on production people should all know that. If you’ve earned a reputation for quality that allows you to charge a premium, your employees should know that, too.

Your employees are constantly making choices that effect the bottom line. It’s to the company’s benefit that they have the knowledge to make the right choices most of the time.

Go to: Great Managers are from Earth

Rule 5: Firing an employee
is almost never the solution.

© Copyright 1999, 2000 by Wayne Bonekemper

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