Too Many Meetings!

I ran a GBU (Good, Bad & Ugly) session with my broader group recently. This was actually an interesting exercise from two perspectives. Firstly facilitating a GBU across 50-60 people, and secondly some of the insights it provided myself and my leadership team.

One particular 'Ugly' that jumped off the page at me was the sentiment 'Too Many Meetings!!'. I can associate with this from one perspective - i.e. my record is 14 meetings in one day. This point aside though it did get me thinking, is it that there are too many meetings or that meetings are poorly run? Or even worse people do not know their role in making them effective.

Obviously meetings do serve a purpose, many in fact. They allow for collaboration, inspiration, innovation, direction setting, delegations, escalations, relationship building, communication etc.

So if they are so useful, why are they so painful? In short, because people are not disciplined, nor do they recognise the role they play in driving effectiveness out of meetings.

There really are only two roles in a meeting, the 'Chair' and the 'Attendees'. Many may challenge me on this with more formal roles such as Secretary, time-keeper, evaluator's etc. For me though, in addressing the 'Too Many Meetings!' sentiment there really are two roles we need to talk about.

The First role - The Chair. If you are the person calling the meeting you carry considerable accountability. You need to ensure a number of things occur, in particular the topic, format, and attendance. Failing to take these considerations into account is a definite indicator that your meeting is in a bad way before it even occurs.

I could in fact write paragraph's on setting up meetings, agenda's, pre-reading, advanced distribution, roles and responsibilities etc. On this occasion I won't, I will simply refer you to the team at Manager-Tools and a series of podcasts they have produced on 'Effective Meetings'.

The Second role - The Attendee (Even as the chair you are really one of these). So what can you as an attendee do to improve the quality of the meetings you attend. The following points are a short list of some principles I apply in my day job:

1. Don't Blindly Accept - Make a judgement call if you should attend, delegate or decline.

Recently I messed up on a meeting invite, instead of simply inviting the sender of an e-mail I managed to invite all of the addressees for a 'Coffee Catch-up'. What was amazing was the number of people who accepted and the buzz I caused in the office. What was this coffee catch-up about, why did he invite so many people, is he going to pay. Yes I was a dill and had to retract - but when you see the people who responded my misdemeanour fades by comparison.

2. If there is no agenda - Restrict the meeting to 30 minutes.

One hour meetings without an agenda are a chat fest. They definitely do have their place when building relationships such as catching up with associates, creating a new business relationship, or meeting with friends/family during the work day, what they don't do though is promote focus, drive and actions.

Therefore if someone approaches you for a 1 hour business meeting that provides no information relating to purpose or scope they should only be graced with 30 minutes unless they can produce the relevant materials.

3. State the purpose and approach upfront

It is not uncommon to arrive at a meeting with little more information than the location, a name and a one liner describing the topic to be discussed. More so if you take into account Principle 2 above.

A way around these scenario's is to simply ask/state the purpose of the meeting up front and ensure agreement amongst the attendee's, this will keep you focused, and allow clear closure to the discussion.

If this happens to be a one hour meeting without an agenda and supporting material. I would encourage you to not only discuss the purpose upfront but to discuss the approach or set the agenda (write it on the whiteboard). This way you can agree the topics to be covered in the time that you have and again check-off and close the discussion effectively.

4. If the delegate is not taking notes their not going to take action.

If you are sitting in a meeting and the attendees are not taking notes throughout, especially if they are clearly being assigned actions/tasks, I would be worried. Subtly encourage them by restating the task, and asking them if they have any questions or concerns about the task they have just picked up, even be so bold to suggest they write it down. If you're not comfortable doing this, provide feedback at your first opportunity.

Keep in mind though, this applies to you as well, note the actions/tasks you receive/agree to do. Following up on actions can only make you look good.

5. Remember your toolbox

A tried and true way to make sure you look good as the chair of a meeting is to build your meeting templates and approaches. We've all come across agenda templates we like, so clear out the detail from the best one you've seen and save it in your toolbox. This way you can always refer to it.

Other examples of this approach include a Standardised 1:1 template, 5 Questions in 30 minutes and even the good old Create and Communicate Direction (CCD) template discussed in one of my earlier posts.

6. Sit-up Straight

I'm a sloucher, I am seriously atrocious. Recognising this in myself I headed off to do some learning. Yet again, I'll suggest a Manager-Tools Podcast. I found their guidance Sit Up, Seat Up, Square Up, Hands up invaluable.

So that is it, a few of the principles I attempt to abide by when it comes to meetings. I am in no way a gun chair of meetings, and I do still slouch when I am an attendee. In any one week I compromise one if not all 6 of the above principles.

All that aside though If you are in a state where you spend your life in meetings, or even worse a company that thrives on them. It will be up to you to make them an experience worth having.

Cheers

Andrew

e-mail Insanity!!

It's been a longtime between posts, I've got heaps of ideas for articles and not enough time to get them on here. So to get me started here is a very brief and simple point.

Over the last couple of months I've been observing a number of people from graduates through to Senior executives on $300k a year using their e-mail. Very few, if any (besides the people I coach) really have a clear take on the mail application they use and how to get the most from it.

Even worse than not knowing how to use the e-mail as a tool is allowing the application to drive your life. I've even seen one senior executive submit themselves to the good old "You've Got Mail" pop-up. Now I know I receive 60-100 e-mails a day and cannot imagine how disruptive a pop-up such as this could be.

With that example in mind, here are a few simple tips that you could consider to help you with your mail:

1. Turn the Pop-up OFF!! - It may have been fun for Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, it definitely isn't fun when you're trying to focus. (Take the above example 100 e-mails / 8 hours = 12.5 interruptions an hour, or an average of an interruption every 4.8 Minutes - INSANE)

2. Use Mail Rules - this is a great way to unclutter your inbox. I in-fact use mail rules for a number of things - from archiving mail newsletters, allocating tasks to a un-categorised action list through to deleting mails. Learn how your mail application does this. (In-fact - if you've subscribed to something and haven't read the last five e-mails, I'd suggest you could un-subscribe)

3. 4 D's - This is a GTD tip from David Allen at davidco.com. Basically when processing e-mail remember there are only 4 things you can do: Do, Delete, Defer or Delegate, amazingly every single one of these D's should result in the e-mail exiting the inbox.

4. Work to get your e-mail above the fold - that is, actively work to get all of your e-mail in the inbox onto one screen and keep it there. Even better go for "InBox Zero" as told by Merlin Mann of 43 Folders in a recent google Tech Talk.

5. Develop an e-mail checking habit - That is, try and discipline yourself to check your e-mail during your working day as minimally as possible. I normally do this morning, mid day and finally at the end of the day. Trust me - if the building is burning down, the printer jammed or any other urgent matter - They're not going to e-mail you. (In fact people e-mailing an urgent matter in reality are not treating the issue at hand seriously, skulking or being political)

6. Use Filters - Some of you are now (especially those workers with 1000 plus e-mails in their inbox) are thinking I'm full of it, and how could they possibly get above the fold. Learn how to use the filters on your mail application. You can filter by date, subject, sender, attachments, comments, if you're in the too field, share the to field, the cc field, the list goes on and on. Learn your app, use the filters and apply the 4 D's to sort your mail out.

There are dozens more tips and tricks floating around from coloring e-mails through to flagging, tagging and who knows what else. But I'm not going to keep going, this was/is meant to be a short post. You can go learn these yourself.

As a parting comment though, seriously, mail is one of the main applications you use on a daily basis, shouldn't you know how to use it? The benefits of doing this as a busy knowledge worker are phenomenal, even if it is the simple benefit of feeling in control, or even a small sense of achievement.

Cheers

Andrew

InBox Zero

Is your e-mail plagued by an InBox out of control?

It appears that e-mail assumed to be the predominant method of communication in todays corporate workplace. In fact it has become so bad you could start to argue that e-mail is now becoming ineffective. People in fact are starting to walk away throwing their hands in the air.

Merlin Mann of 43Folders has a massive amount of material on this issue with some tremendous and practical suggestions. You can get these at http://www.43folders.com/izero/
The google presentation which is his latest addition is well worth a watch.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=973149761529535925&hl=en

Some of these points have helped me achieve "InBox Zero"

Cheers

Andrew