Meetings – Understanding The Shapes and Roles

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First in a series.

No matter where you are in the food chain, meetings are critical to success as a manager. It is important to know how to initiate, lead, and participate in meetings. This series of Management Notes on meetings addresses some basic concepts and skills.

But, first, lets start with some discussion of exactly what a meeting is and how meetings function in our organizational lives.

Meetings come in many forms: meetings in conference rooms, in the hallway or parking lot, or over lunch. Email, especially the emails with lengthy lists of recipients and responders, those seemingly endless threaded discussions, present a new form of “meeting”. Instant messaging and, more frequently in dispersed organizations, video conferencing are new forms of meetings.

Meetings can range in size from two people to thousands.

Meetings can be formal with agendas, moderators, chairpersons, and written rules of conduct. Meetings can also be informal, impromptu, and fluid.

Meetings serve a wide range of functions in an organization. Formal meetings may be just for the dissemination of organizational news, policies, or procedures. Formal meetings may also be information gathering, problem-solving, and task setting events. Formal meetings are frequently regular opportunities for teams to check the status and critical actions required to keep a project, business unit or whole organization on track.

Informal meetings provide opportunities for exchange of views on the state of the organization, queries for information, requests for comment, critique, new ideas, challenges to the existing beliefs about the organization, and so on.

In every case the culture of the organization is being displayed, exercised, and critiqued in meetings. Meetings display clearly what is valued and prized by the culture. The way in which people conduct themselves displays how the organization values people and the way in which people should interact. Meetings also are the key arena for the robust dialogue that keeps every organization faced towards the reality of its performance, its customers, the changing environment, and the competition. Meetings require candor and honesty to be effective.

This suggests that managers must pay close attention to how they personally perform in meetings, meetings of all types, and, perhaps, especially in the informal meetings.

This suggests further that effective managers understand how important it is to have meetings that are productive and carried out in a manner that reflects the most positive interactions between people.

Effective managers also see meetings as an opportunity to diagnose the health of business processes as well as the culture and an opportunity to change behavior and achieve better results.

The Positive in Action – examples from leadership

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Recently I visited a medium size bakery. My host was the founder, a third generation pastry chef, and, as I quickly learned, a very clever yet profoundly modest person. As we talked about how he had started the business and guided its growth, it was immediately obvious to me that he completely understood who he is and who he is not. He has assembled a team of managers around him to handle all of the aspect of the business that are not his natural bent. When I asked him, “What part of the business do you wake up in the morning and rush over here to get to?”, he immediately launched into stories of his new products, pies, cakes, torts, pastries of all sorts. When I asked him about other parts of the business, he referred to his colleagues as the holders of the reins and wisdom, though I had no doubt that he had more than a passing awareness of those fields, too. Overall, during our discussion, he focused continuously on the positive, the positives in his people, customers, and suppliers. The negatives were just factors to be dealt with, but not moaned over. So, I thought, here is a manager with a powerful sense of the strength of the positive.

Finally, we got to the tour of the plant. This is the third plant he has built. Clearly he had continued to learn lessons. The most telling point for me came when we paused in the break room and he pointed to a TV hanging off the wall to explain that they frequently used that for employee training. Then, he told me this wonderful story.

[I paraphrase his story below]

Recently we have been hiring employees who come from Brazil. We carefully sit them down in front of the TV and show them videos about the importance of cleanliness and detailed instructions for washing hands. After the video we re-emphasize the importance of hand washing, especially the use of hot water. So, I think, we have done a good job of instructing our new hires.

Then, I noticed that when they went to one of the numerous wash stations, they used cold water to wash. Well, lets repeat the lessons with more emphasis on hot water. Nothing seemed to be working. Finally, I learned from one of the employees that for many Brazilians, warm water is bad water, it is the water standing around in their tropical and semi-tropical environments. For them, cold water is rare and represents purity. Aha, now I understood how to break through. They are responding with their hearts in the best way they know how.

I was stunned. Here was his power of the positive in action and on display. No executive speech. A simple story that demonstrates how he sees the best in people around him and acts on that.

Managers – Early Intervention Is Key To Getting Your People Right

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After you hire or promote a person, there is a tendency to walk away with a big smile on your face. “What a smart person I am. I hired the right person and now my job is done.” Six months later you realize that the person has drowned in their new post, everything is in disarray. But, now it is too late. The damage is done.


To correct this managers need to practice a little humility and be attentive, supportive and alert during the early stages of a new hire or promotion’s tenure. The humility arises from recognizing that more than at any other point in the life span of a manager-supervisee relationship, the early stages require the most intense application of an all important management rule: “If an employee is working below expected or required performance it is always the manager’s fault.” The first place to look is at the manager. After all, the manager hired or selected the person. The manager defines the work, provides tools, training, and all other resources required for the job.  The manager is responsible for the success of every person they supervise. By focusing on the results achieved and understanding how to move the performance towards the desired results, you can focus on tools, training, support resources that will allow your new person to succeed.


Beyond this principle, we have to acknowledge that the hiring and promotion process is one of the more flawed management practices. Some claim that in a third or a half of the cases we make the wrong decision. This merely emphasizes the need to be very observant of the performance of new hires a and new promotions because we need to be ready to act when it turns out that we’ve made a mistake.


So, when you have your new person in place and have given them clear instructions about their initial tasks, set up a time, within a week or so, at which you will have a meeting to review performance and see what further support needs to be provided. This is especially valuable in environments where you have a new hire or promotion in a new position where the variables of the goals and tasks are inherently unclear. There’s nothing like having a quick meeting to take the pulse of the new tasks and make course corrections immediately. And, remind your new person that you are readily available to discuss their work at any time.


If you find yourself in one of those rare positions where your decision to hire or promote a person turned out to be fatally flawed, don’t let the situation just linger on. If you follow that strategy, you will end up with a lot of poor performance and unhappy people. It is almost always true that other people in the organization will readily recognize that your new hire is not performing well and is in fact in the early stages of drowning. When you let a person linger in this manner, you are demonstrating to others that you are not a very competent manager, nor a caring one. And, your new hire or promotion know themselves that they’re having deep trouble performing their job. You are doing no one a favor by allowing a failing person to linger on. If you’re in a larger organization, you should seek out alternative positions where this person could perform well for the company. If such a transfer is not possible, you have to face up to it and terminate the person’s employment. When you act promptly in such situations, everyone around you sees that you are a competent manager who is facing up to an error in judgment. And, in my experience the employee involved is grateful that you dealt with the situation in an objective, fair, and caring manner.

Product Line Analysis or Knowing Where the Profits Are

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An important step for every business manager is to understand where profits are coming from. Too many managers are relying on  the basic Profit and Loss statement that comes to them from their accountant. This is not always a useful management tool.

Lets take a look at a situation where a web-based services company is experiencing good growth and reasonable profits. They have four lines of business addressing their single basic service to four different markets. Based on their market analysis, they decide that they will focus their marketing dollars and development resources on one of the four for the next year.

Six months into the mission, sales have continued upwards, but profits are not tracking along at the same rate, the quality of earnings is suffering. Why is this happening?

First they muscled their way through some spreadsheet work sorting out their COGS (Cost Of Goods Sold) and reassigning previously Fixed Expenses in marketing that really could be assigned to each of their four market areas. Then they discovered that the the market segment that they had focused their efforts on had never been very profitable and they had made the situation worse by increasing the sales volume through it.

On closer analysis it became evident that the lack of profitability came from two sources. First, the marketing costs of acquiring customers in  this market channel had been 60% higher than in  the others. Second, the vendor providing the back office services supporting this channel was 30% more expensive than vendors supporting the other market segments. In the short run, the managers decided to shift their focus to another one of their markets. In the long run they decided to search for a better vendor and conduct some research on why the marketing costs were so high.

So, if you have a business where you are selling more than one product or service to more than a lone customer, think about developing the financial management tools that will tell you where your sales and profits are actually coming from.

Making tough times harder by communicating too much!

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Good communications is important to the health of the organization. However, there are moments when managers should look carefully at their communications and push on the “not-so-fast” button.

During periods of organizational stress, like changes in ownership, senior leadership, layoffs, mergers, and others, managers may think that they can calm down the troops by increasing the frequency and depth of their communications. Unfortunately, this may lead to a surprising result. Employees, like everyone else, pay attention to more than the message. Marshall McLuhan got this right.

During times of stress, the tendency of managers to increase the frequency of communication with staff in fact sends the message, “Gee, the bosses are nervous about what is going on. Look at how much they are talking about it.”

So, be careful. Focus on brevity and facts. Be as honest as you can about what is going on.

But, be a good model for your staff. During times of stress and turbulence, redouble your focus on customers and day-to-day tasks. Get in early and be at work when the staff arrives. They will get that message. No matter what happens, being productive is always a good strategy, both for the company and the individual.

Time, the only resource you can’t buy more of, nor outsource

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The supply of time is completely inelastic. This fact must be a central focus for every manager. The only time you have is passing by now, never to be seen again, nor squirreled away for future use.

To be an effective manager, you must gain control of your time. Without control over your time all other management tasks are impossible. You are carried along by day-to-day pressures. You operate, but don’t manage.

Effective managers learn to: (1) diagnose how their time is consumed, then (2) prune out waste continuously. This allows them to (3) consolidate discretionary blocks of time that can then be used to do important forward looking management work.

The first step toward gaining control of time is to record how it is used. Keep a log for a couple of weeks. Include every work related activity. Track who, what, why, how long, and where. Keep a close eye on every meeting including one-on-one conversations, telephone calls, emails, instant messaging, and so on. Record every activity!

The second step is to analyze your log and prune out all of the wasteful activities.  Meetings are by far the most common time wasters, but don’t ignore reports and presentations that you must prepare. You can borrow from the Toyota Production System (aka lean manufacturing in the US and elsewhere) and ask the “Five Why’s”. For example: “Why am I at this meeting?”  “No, really, why am I at this meeting?” and so on. Get to the bottom of why this meeting is taking place, the root.

This is not the place for a lengthy discussion of pruning, but here are a couple of ways to look at meetings that will lead you to stop holding some of them.