The Rules Of Management (Pioneer Panel's Library) (3 page)

Be aware that some meetings are there to help your team meet each other, bond, socialize together, find out about each other, and see you in your true role as team leader.

If you want your meetings to be effective, then remain firmly in control—no wishy-washy democracies here. You are the manager and you are in charge—end of story. To be effective you shouldn’t allow anyone to reminisce, ramble, jabber on, or refuse to shut up or relax. Keep ’em moving fast and get them out of the door as soon as you can.

Right, now you’re sure this meeting is necessary, and what it’s for, let’s keep it as brief and effective as possible.

Hold all meetings at the end of the day rather than at the beginning. Everyone’s anxious to go home, and it keeps meetings shorter; at the beginning of the day, everyone has hours to digress and chat. Unless of course it is a bonding meeting; you can cheerfully hold them at the beginning of business.

See how many meetings you could hold by email, phone, or one-to-one. (Cut out everyone who isn’t absolutely essential.)

Start all meetings on time. Never wait for anyone. Never go back over stuff for latecomers. If they’ve missed something vital, they can get it from others after the meeting, and it’ll teach ’em to be on time next time. Useful tip—never schedule meetings to begin exactly on the hour, always say 3:10 p.m. rather than 3 o’clock. You’ll find people will always be more punctual if you set an “odd” time. Try 3:35 p.m. if you want to be really wacky.

Schedule the meeting far enough in advance—but not too far—so that no one can say they had something else to do. Confirm the day before with everyone to make sure they have remembered and can make it.

You decide who keeps the minutes—and make sure he does, and to your liking. You don’t have to be bossy or aggressive about this, just firm, friendly, and utterly in control.

Make sure every point on the agenda ends up with an action plan—no action plan means it was just a chat. Or make a decision of course.

You don’t do “any other business”—ever. If it’s important it should be on the agenda. If it isn’t, then it shouldn’t be there at all. “Any other business” is invariably someone trying to get something over on someone else. Don’t allow it—ever.

If meetings are getting too big—more than six people—start to subdivide them into committees, and get your committees to report back.

And most important of all—engrave this one on your heart—all meetings must have a definite purpose. At the end of the meeting you must be able to say whether you met that purpose. Oh yes, and hold all meetings on uncomfortable chairs (or standing, à la
West Wing
)—that speeds things up considerably.

I guess that when you were working your way up to your illustrious position of today you had to sit through many interminable meetings, all boring, all stupifyingly dull. Well, the pattern has to be broken somewhere, and I’m relying on you to break it. The old way of doing meetings has to stop, and you’re the person to do the stopping.

So let’s make ’em fun. Now, before we go on, I remember a tip I read somewhere. Basically you were supposed to give out five coins to each meeting member, and when they wanted to speak, they had to spend a penny. After they had used up their coins, they were done and couldn’t say anything more. It was supposed to make people really cautious about speaking and reluctant to spend all their coins on trivia. Fun? Maybe. But it would also get you quite a reputation as a prankster and an ineffectual meeting leader. As would other suggestions such as

• Formal dress

• Food and/or drink (unless it’s lunchtime, in which case that’s functional not fun; or if you take your team out to a restaurant or down the sports bar, and then it’s not a meeting, it’s a bonding session—or a thank you of course: see
Rule 20
)

• Games, quizzes, or contests of any sort

• Having small surprises such as chocolates taped under the chairs

• A talking stick (don’t ask—a New Age Californian thing)

• Blindfolds

• Letting the most junior member chair the meeting

All of these head toward farce, ruin, and idiocy. Don’t go there.

So how can you shake things up without looking like Michael Scott? Well, for a start, fun doesn’t have to mean silly or stupid.

Fun means not being stuffy, allowing people to be themselves and to bring their own contribution. Fun means allowing people to share things that have made them laugh without being frowned on. Fun is about letting people tell stories or anecdotes that lighten the mood. (Just know when to say, “Right, back to business.”) Fun means being flexible enough to allow other suggestions as to where and how you all meet. Perhaps your organization has a great boardroom—could you meet there? Or outside if the weather is good.

The confident manager—that’s you—can be flexible because you are relaxed and cool and confident. The stuffy manager is frightened, feeling insecure, and seeking a rigid approach to prop up a lack of self-confidence.

A really good manager, yep that’s you again, knows that when their team takes wing and soars, they too will soar. Getting your team to soar takes courage, grit, determination, and an overwhelming passion.

You have to make members of your team better than you, which means trusting them, getting them the best resources, training them to take over from you, trusting them not to stab you in the back when it’s time to take over from you, and being confident enough in your own abilities not to be jealous of them when they do take off. Tall order.

It takes quite some manager to carry this one out. You have to be pretty relaxed and secure in your own position. Encouraging your team to bring it on takes guts, quite frankly.

Let’s take a look at your team. Who’ve you got there? Which ones will one day fill your shoes? What can you share with them to urge them on?

Shoe-fillers are the ones you want to cultivate and grow. They are the bright ones, the keen ones, the eager beavers. I once had a young assistant who was so sharp he scared me. But when I did move on up, he filled my shoes. And he came with me over several moves, always one step behind. Now the crazy thing was he was better than me in lots of ways but he never overtook me. It could have been out of respect but I doubt it—the industry I worked in was a little cut-throat to say the least. No, it was habit.

After you’ve built a good team, it gets in the habit of having you as the manager, and then it feels comfortable with that and doesn’t mutiny or overtake you. Teams do that only when they feel resentful or mistrusted. So bring ’em on and train ’em up and make ’em better.

You are the most important person on your team, and you’d better know it. No, not because you’re a better person or more experienced or more valuable or anything to get big-headed about. You’re the most important person because everyone else will take their lead from you. You set the bar.

If you play dirty, backstab, worry that your team members are better than you, spy on them, try to stop them outshining you, or are unethical, disrespectful, or anything else of the sort, then you’re not going to excel as a manager, and your team members will be so busy checking over their shoulders that they won’t perform, and your department won’t shine.

Maybe you don’t get involved in all that nasty stuff? Good, pleased to hear it. But it won’t help much either if you whine, complain about directors or customers, take a negative view, resist change, talk about how much you’re looking forward to Friday afternoon, always take the easy option, or avoid hard work—your team will copy all those things instead.

Listen, if you don’t set the standard, raise the tone, be the person you want your team to be, then you won’t be a truly great manager. Your team is like a flock of birds or sheep or, well, anything that comes in a flock.
^*
Where one goes, they all go. And you’re the one they all follow. If you shine, everyone shines. If you fail, everyone fails. Because of you. Scary, huh?

^*
Except maybe wallpaper.

But it’s OK. Because you can be that brilliant manager they need to lead them. And when you are, they’ll be a brilliant team full of brilliant people. Not only will you succeed personally, but you’ll also bring success to everyone around you. You’ll approach every task with enthusiasm backed up by solid analysis and common-sense strategies. You’ll treat people around you fairly, and encourage others, and deliver better than you promised, and create a positive atmosphere, and so will everyone around you. Because of you.

You have to, right from day one, be totally on top of the discipline issue. Remember earlier we talked about how looking after your team can be a bit like being a parent? Well, as a parent you pretty well have to set boundaries and practice zero tolerance to survive. Give ’em an inch and they’ll take a mile. If you are seen to be soft, they’ll take advantage. The good thing with clear boundaries and zero tolerance is you have a finite line—a yardstick by which you can judge everything. All you have to do is ask, “Is this a breach of the rules?” If it is, stop it. If you do allow it, where do you stop?

Say one of your clear boundaries is timekeeping. (It might be dress or customer care or whatever, but just say it’s timekeeping.) If one minute late is fine, what about two? If two is fine, what about three? And so on until people are wandering in at whatever time they feel like. But if you don’t allow it, then that’s the end of the story. You don’t have to think about that particular issue any more. Whereas if you do allow infringements, small breaches, you are forever having to consider, “Is this a step too far?” “Can I get control back?” “How far am I prepared to go?”

This doesn’t mean you need to have hundreds of rules and be ridiculously inflexible. It means that you need to decide on your few key boundaries that are important to you and to the team and the business. Make them clear. And make them firm.

Remember you are dealing with a team—I will stress this again and again throughout this book—and not an individual. You might feel that for each person an exception can be made, but you aren’t dealing with individuals—you are dealing with
a team. If you are seen to be soft on one individual, then you must be soft on all. If you allow one to wander in late, then all must be allowed to wander in late. If one person can get away with breaking the rules, then all must be allowed.

The good manager is firm on inappropriate behavior because this sends out a clear message to all the team—the message that you are a good, firm, in-control sort of manager who sets more store by what the team can achieve collectively than by being thought of as an easy-going, laid-back, nice person. Yes, individually some of the team may rate you as pretty cool if you let them get away with murder, but the team will collectively trash you.

OK, so say you’ve got an orchestra and you get them to play. You listen. Something is wrong somewhere. Yep, that flute player is out of tune, off key, and playing from a different music sheet. Now you have three choices:

• Put up with it

• Change it

• End it

Let’s have a little look at these three because, as in all things—from relationships, to life, to work, to being a parent—these three choices are the same every time.

So, you’re going to put up with it. This makes your entire orchestra sound flat, out of tune, and ill-fitted to do its job properly—that of supplying sweet music to the masses. Your listening public (your objective) will not listen and will accuse you, the orchestra leader, of being a jerk
^*
—and they would be right.

^*
They don’t of course use this word, but I’m not allowed to use the word they really would use.

OK, so you’re going to try to change it. Flute player X gets some retraining. He gets sent on a remedial flute course—residential of course. He returns with the right music sheet but has decided to switch to the bassoon because he was feeling creatively hemmed in by the flute. Problem sorted. Well done for tackling it.

However, what if his report says he is tone deaf and should never have been in the orchestra in the first place and should have taken up a career sounding the fire alarm somewhere? What you can’t do is then embark on another course of action where you give him the triangle to play, but he messes that up too and by now the rest of the orchestra has lost confidence in you and is beginning to mutiny.

Time for the third course. You make him no longer needed. It is swift and kind. He can then go on to become a champion alarm ringer somewhere, somewhere else that is, and your orchestra recognizes you as decisive, knowing what you want, objective (you put the needs of the many before the bad playing of one) and utterly in charge. Have an extra brownie point.

Always be ready to prune dead wood, straggly growth, lousy flute players (and any other team players who don’t cut the mustard).

The good manager, and that is you from now on, knows that she manages events, processes, situations, strategies but never people. Look, let’s imagine you have a big garden and decide to employ a gardener. Do you manage the gardener? No. He manages himself quite nicely, thank you. Your job is to manage the garden. You’ll decide what to plant and when and where. The gardener, like a spade or a wheelbarrow, becomes a tool in that garden and a tool you can use to manage your garden effectively. But you don’t manage the gardener. He manages himself. You tell him what you want done and he gets on with it. You delegate and he digs, and delves, and plants, and prunes, and tends, and weeds. The plants actually manage themselves as well; neither you nor the gardener actually grows anything—you both manage. The gardener is your useful assistant, your tool to getting stuff done.