MEETING PEOPLE—THE GAMES WE PLAY

“People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything”

--Thomas Sowell, American Writer and Economist

Please excuse my title. As they say in sports, there is a little ‘trickeration’ at work.  I really didn’t mean to imply that this blog was about the act of meeting people. No, in fact, I was using the word ‘meeting’ as a descriptive adjective—not a verb. My intent in this blog is to write about the types of people I have observed in the countless meetings I attended during my career. Just for grins, I use to classify my peers and others by virtue of their similar behaviors—sort of my own taxonomy of meeting participants.

As I wrote in my last blog, “meetings are the bane of most employees”.  Meetings, because they are necessary, however, are not going away. An efficient and effective meeting is a thing of beauty—both in design and execution. Unfortunately, the best designed meeting can be undermined by one or more of the participants. And, we all have been conspirators and co-conspirators in derailing a well designed meeting—sometimes consciously, sometimes unwittingly. I realize that to enumerate is to limit. Still, I want to share my personal taxonomy of meeting participants. This list is not intended to be exhaustive, empirical or even equitable. It is, simply, the product of my twisted world view of human nature.

In fact, my discussion of the types I am about to talk about often described me—or as the cartoon cat, Garfield, would say “I resemble that remark.” Still, in the spirit of the blissful blogger, I will tread on to the taxonomy. Ok, let’s leap into the world according to me. 

No doubt there are others that could be added to a list of meeting types. For example, the Slick, the Sly and theWicked  along with the Crackberry addict come to mind. 

However, I will list the types I have identified below and describe them to the best of my recollection. They are as follows: 

The Smoozer

The Socialite

The Socrates

The Silent

Understand, my friends, that this list was purely a creation of a fatigued and meeting addled mind—i.e., a mind, often, paying more attention to the participant’s behaviors than the presentations.

So let us get started. I did not list the most important participant in the meeting—the leader or boss. The leader/boss can be, either, a facilitator, referee or circus ringmaster. Armed with a clear agenda, s/he sets the tone for the meeting—the ambiance or climate. S/he can either follow or subvert the agenda. And, if there is no agenda; there is no meeting—just a gathering of people looking for reasons why they are sharing the same space and time. Without strong leadership, even a meeting with a clear agenda will devolve into a series of sideshows starring one or more of the participants I listed above as types. The leader facilitator makes sure that the meeting is not dominated by any one type of participant. Looking through the leader's eyes, here is how the particular types of participants might behave in a meeting.

The ‘Smoozer’ is usually recognized by his/her fixed gaze and ‘bobbing head’, signifying approval to any sound, word or statement uttered by the boss. Sometimes the smoozer even adds a sound element to his/her head gesture. The sound is usually a soft and purring “yes” –audible enough to be heard by the boss. Additionally, this type is very good at “summarizing” what the boss has said for the benefit of the 'less astute' in the meeting.

Yet, there is usually one type in the meeting who benefits from this summarization—that being the “Socialite”. He/she is so busy with their own agenda—i.e., cracking jokes, reliving the weekend or discussing their kids’ latest accomplishments—that sometimes they appear peeved, because the rest of the engaged participants are “talking too loud”. You can spot the ‘socialite’, most often, by his/her fixed smile and darting eyes. Their objective is to look engaged. As such, they, frequently, borrow the “bobbing head” routine of the ‘smoozer’. Yet, as we use to say, “Lights on, nobody home”.

Perhaps the most vexatious type is the “Socrates” or ‘know it all’.  This is the person who has positioned him/herself as the ‘keeper of all insight’ in the known universe. Until Socrates weights in, all perspectives are subject to doubt. Ironically, other meeting participants defer to this pompous and punctilious egotist. Socrates sometimes dominates dialogue and, at other times, is a sniper, waiting for the opportune time to attack and correct. The strange thing about the Socrates type is that they are often ‘right—but, more often, irrelevant’. He/she arbitrarily sets up a false premise, attacks or defends it and then ‘waxes eloquently’ on why the rest of the team should adopt this point of view. Interestingly enough, the Socrates type has the discipline “to keep his powder dry” until he/she sees an opening.

While the Socrates type can mimic the Silent type for a short period of time, they cannot sustain it. The Silent type can sit through a 3 hour meeting without saying a word; without head or body gesturing; without making a single contribution to the meeting agenda. In a sense, they are a selfish and cowardly lot. They subscribe to Abraham Lincoln’s old adage that “it is better to be thought a fool, then to open your mouth and prove it”. However, often they are the most opinionated and talkative among the team—after the meeting was adjourned. When asked, why they didn’t contribute? They will usually claim that everyone else was dominating the dialogue or, as one friend pointed out, they assert that they "didn't want to create waves". They are the turtles of the corporate world; sticking their necks out only to cross the road back to the coffee room.

In summary, I realize that the types of meeting participants do not always fall into such a neat and tidy taxonomy. Still, that is my point of view—and I’m sticking to it.

A Pain in the Rear—Meeting-itis?

“Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot masturbate”

 Dave Barry quotes

The bane of most employees is the dreaded ‘staff meeting’—a recurring and, seemingly, indestructible corporate ritual. The team, department, functional, regional and/or company ‘rah rah’ meeting annually consumes an inordinate amount of employee time and energy.  And, the cost to the enterprise can be measured in ‘real dollars’. Assume ten people, earning over $100K per year, have been sequestered for a four hour meeting.  Even before the costs for the continental breakfast, the box / hot lunch and the afternoon snacks are added in, think about the $20K in ‘staff time’ already spent. Specifically, assuming each employee in the meeting is earning about $50per hour x 10 employees=$500 per hour x 4 hrs=$20K of sunk investment for the meeting. I calculate ‘staff time’ because, if not in the meeting, the staff would/should be working towards organizational goals and objectives.  If the meeting is facilitative towards more efficiently and effectively meeting stated goals and objectives—then meeting time and expense is a good investment; if not, the meeting is ‘time off task’ and an example of squandering scarce resources. Not all meetings are time wasters, some are useful and necessary. In my mind, the four types of necessary staff meetings are:

1. Planning,  

2. Calibration,

3. Informational and, the occasional,

4. Motivational (inspirational) meeting.  

The Planning meeting should be strategic in nature and designed to articulate the goals and objectives the enterprise will seek to achieve over a defined period of time. The outcome of the meeting will be to align behavior/performance to support the course of action the organization plans to follow over the short term (year) or long term (3-5 years). Planning is based on historical data, trends and performance against prior period goals; taking into consideration environmental changes in demographics, competitive framework and the talent, skills and abilities of your current workforce. A good Planning meeting is based on a realistic assessment of the organization’s ability to achieve its stated goals. The outcome of the Planning meeting should be goals that are realistic and time bound. Setting goals that look good but are unrealistic creates, over time, a cynicism in the both the stockholders and shareholders mind. Goal setting is not about ‘optics’. Goal setting is about setting targets that can be reached—not targets that are designed to appease and/or over promise.

  

The next necessary meeting is the Calibration meeting. This is where we should be measuring progress against goals. The ideal frequency, in my estimation, for this type of meeting is quarterly. If we meet too soon, not enough data or information is available to make sound decisions; if we meet too late, little or nothing can be done to alter the course we are on—put another way, “you can’t un-ring a bell.” A timely calibration meeting will allow the organization to reallocate resources, to deploy or redeploy talent and/or to “cut our losses.”

The Informational meeting should be devoted to just that—giving out new and important information about organizational policies, procedure and practices that impact the way people do their jobs. Consequently, this type of meeting need not consume a lot of presentation time. Presentation decks and overheads should be streamlined, simple and direct. Please avoid the PowerPoint orgy of lights, sound and motion. Shoot straight. Tell’em what you’re  going to talk about; talk about it; and, then tell’em what you just talked about—i.e., introduction, body and summary. Leave some time for questions and answers. Request that participants write down their questions on the 3x5 note cards handed out before the meeting started.

  

And finally, the Motivational meeting or what I refer to as the ‘rah rah’ meeting. These types of meetings are the staple of Sales organizations. Outrageous themes, loud, bone jarring, music along with elaborate production sets, guest speakers and plenty of “we are the greatest, nothing like us ever was” speeches characterize these gatherings. Based on how I describe these meetings, you might be surprised that I list them as necessary. Well, they are necessary—every 2 to 3 years. People need to feel a part of something—a movement or a dynasty ! Work needs to be about more than coming into the office, going through the daily routine and feeling like the Charles Schultz’s Peanut character who said, “Achieving something around here is like wearing dark pants and peeing on yourself—you get a warm feeling, but nobody notices.” Well, somebody will notice at a properly designed motivational meeting. Employees get to interact with each other, trade ‘war stories’ and pump each other up. The atmosphere can be both festive and focused!

In this blog, I have described, to the best of my recollection, the meetings I sat through during my corporate career. My next blog will discuss the types of participants I saw at these meetings.

OMG! .... NOT ANOTHER REORGANIZATION?!!

“We trained hard—but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form into teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing. And what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization"

--Gaius Petronius Arbiter, 1st Century A.D.

  

Look, I know that not all reorganizations are bad, useless and/or political ‘eye wash’. A well thought out reorganization can and has saved many an enterprise.

Still, what causes an enterprise to consider reorganization? Is something not working the way it should? Has something changed--our customer base, our strategy, our mission and/or our vision? Will reorganizing improve our chances of survival or result in an increased profitability? Or, to use a football down and distance analogy--is it 3rd and 25 and the only play we can call is "punt"? And, finally, why do most employees cringe at the thought of reorganization?

Well I would submit that all of the above are both plausible and real. Yet, I think that in today's "zoom zoom" world, the “We Must Change " mantra is the reason and rationale behind most of the reorganization mania. For the record, I am not suggesting that all reorganization initiatives are simply knee jerk reactions to the "we must change" mandate. No, there are examples like Ford Motor Company who realized that they must change or die. But, out of the countless number of reorganizations launched each year, the Fords' might be the exception and not the rule.

Why, you ask, is the Change mandate so pervasive and powerful a motive? To date, I have not found a better explanation than that given by William Bridges, in his landmark book, “Transitions, Making Sense of Life’s Changes”

Here goes his profound insight:

 “Modern societies are the first in history in which people have been rewarded for keeping the level of societal change high. Most other times and places have rewarded and honored people for protecting the society’s continuities; but our society rewards change in the name of “innovation”. Our economy depends upon it, and if the innovation ceased, our economy as a whole—and, of course, most people’s individual careers—would fall apart.

So we’ve got a change-dependent economy and a culture that celebrates creativity and innovation. There is no way that our careers won’t  be punctuated by frequent changes, each of which demands a transition from an old way of doing things and old identity to a new one. And there is no way that these transitions won’t  take a significant toll on our productivity as we temporarily siphon off energy and time from performing our jobs to making the transitions. If that temporary displacement of energy happens to only a few individuals, it is their  problem; but when it occurs on a large scale, as it does during big reorganizations and mergers, the individual problem of career transition becomes the organization’s problem, in the form of “ reduced productivity”, “absenteeism”, “increased defects” or “turnover”.”

He sounds a little bit like old Gaius P. Arbiter back in the 1^st century AD—doesn’t he?

REVISITING THE MATRIX—WHO’S GOT THE DING DONG!?

"No servant can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to one, and despise the other.”

Luke 16:13

The above cited biblical verse, sort of, sums up the biggest issue facing the organizational management structural design known as Matrix management.  If you’ve worked in any modern day Fortune 500 company, you’ve no doubt been in the ‘Matrix’. In fact, most corporate organizations today are organized around some variation of the matrix structure. Basically, the ‘Matrix’ is organized around so-called support Functions in which employees with similar skills and/or professional training function like campus frats or sororities. Often, these employees pledge their loyalty first to their ‘functional boss’.  And, why shouldn’t they? Ultimately and contrary to what the policy says about shared evaluations, it is the ‘functional boss’ who will control their money, upward mobility and careers. Yet, once deployed, functional employees must quickly become adept at pleasing another boss; a line boss with a P & L—who, also, has some organizational ‘juice’ and power that must be reckoned with. Some well known examples of support functions are Finance, Engineering, R & D, Sales and HR.

 These Functional employees may be assigned to different business units and report directly into a ‘line or business boss’—as well as a ‘functional boss’ of equal status. I have been told that the Line boss tells you what to do and Functional boss tells you how to do it. While attempting to show who ‘owns’ whom, organizational charts  can be rendered undecipherable—with  a dizzying  array of solid and dotted lines competing for attention. Usually, however, the two ‘bosses’ work it out. They are, most likely, friendly—if not cordial; they are usually peers who respect each other; they will seek alignment and agreement before risking animosity and acrimony over disagreeing about a shared ‘direct report’. Geez, lest one forgets, they are members of the same ‘Leadership Lodge’. In essence, they’ve learned to share ‘the ding-dong of power’.

But, what about the Project Manager, who carries the portfolio of the Big Boss; who has to manage employees from multiple support functions; who has to meld a disparate group of functional experts into a cohesive project team; who has an unforgiving timeline and scarce resources –what about him or her? If the Bible warns about serving two masters, then, one would surmise that a third master is not really a master after all. So often, being a Project Manager in a matrix management organization is tantamount to “herding cats”. Not only must he/she manage a team with skill sets different from his/her; he/she must find a way to establish measures of effectiveness that are rigorous enough to ensure each member contributes their expertise to the best of their functional ability. He/she must know enough to evaluate their performance as well as enough not to be ‘snowed’ by functional jargon and terminology that doesn’t “move the peanut forward”.

And, as a former boss of mine often said, “I don’t need people who can describe the peanut or weigh the peanut—I just want the ones who know how to move the peanut forward.” In other words,  getting the job done is the main thing. Still, alas, the beleaguered project manager is left with the task of getting individuals from different parts—and, often, different time zones of the enterprise. Well, first,  to get off on the right foot, the project manager must “take the order” correctly. In essence, he/she must be absolutely clear on what outcomes the organization desires from the project being launched. Basically, he/she must find out ‘what good looks like” to the sponsoring ‘powers.’ Next, make sure the Function offers up individuals that are viewed as either high potential (the young upwardly mobile) or high professional (the institutional memory keepers). A mix of these two types of employees would be ideal. Their collective input and diversity of perspectives will guarantee that problems are viewed from a variety of different perspectives. It is only with these divergent views that we can expand the solution spaces.

Finally, the Project manager must encourage development of a set of decision rules to be used as the initiative goes forward. And, the most important decision rule is, “who has the performance evaluation “ding dong?” Put another way, who appraises the performance of the project team members? I would submit that it should be—no must be—the actual Project Manager. The Functional boss is too far away from the action and is often influenced by factors other than actual contribution to the Project.  More importantly, as Michael Leboeuf said, in his seminal book, Greatest Management Principle, GMP, “…people don’t do what you inspect or expect—they do what you reward.” Got it—they do what you reward! 


An equally important decision rule that must be hammered out has to do with the allocation and expenditure of resources. The Project Manager must be given both responsibility and authority. Authority boils down to who can spend what and when. 

These two decision rules will improve the probability of success for most projects. In essence, the Project Manager needs the two most important powers in the corporate universe--i.e., the "power to define ( what good looks like) and the power to punish (what is defined as not acceptable behavior).

Well, until next time, “that’s my point of view and I am sticking to it.”

Personal Mastery--The Journey to Competency

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light that most frightens us…”

--quoted by Nelson Mandela, 1994 Inaugural Speech

I mentioned in my last blog that 'no matter how gifted or talented, nobody comes into a job fully up to speed'. It just will not happen.  Nope. Won’t happen. In fact, there is a definite process for attaining competency. And, for the record, competency is the quality of being adequately or well qualified physically and/mentally for a particular undertaking. In my experience, the gaining of competence involves awareness, understanding and mastery.

Several years ago, I heard this process broken down into four phases. The four phases were described as Unconscious Incompetence, Conscious Incompetence, Unconscious Competence and, finally, Conscious Competence. Allow me to elaborate on each of the phases as it relates to mastering a certain task or combination of tasks-- i.e., a job.

We come into a job not knowing what we don’t know. This is Unconscious Incompetence. Simply put, “I don’t know what I don’t know." This is the period of trial and error and ‘fake it till you make it’. We project a confident demeanor; we pretend we knew a particular approach was risky’; we put forth points of view intended to impress—yet devoid of certainty and/or facts. During this phase, feedback is intense and swift. Our learning curve is steep and fraught with anxiety. Yet, it is during this phase that well- meaning colleagues and good bosses come to the rescue. They point out, in very clear terms, what we need to know to be successful in the job. With their help, we are on track to the next phase of gaining competence—Conscious Incompetence.

In this new phase, we are, at least, beginning to ‘know what we didn’t know’. At this point, we become conscious of the voids in our knowledge, skills and abilities needed to do the job in an acceptable manner. Conscious Incompetence is a critical phase in our development. Because, it is in this phase that we are able to identify and isolate specific areas of development needed to be successful in this job. It is during this phase that the performance appraisal process becomes more than just perfunctory. To use an athletic term, this were we start to become “fundamentally sound”. We begin to grasp the ‘nuts and bolts’ of the job—both ‘the what’ and ‘the how’ aspects of performance. The job requirements begin to make more sense to us. Heck, we are even able to help the ‘newbie’ who, like us not too long ago, is trying to get their ‘head around’  the what and how of doing the job.

And, as we begin to share our knowledge of job requirements with others, a strange thing happens to us. We become aware of what we are good at in performing our job. This zone of awareness is moving us towards Conscious Competence. During this phase we exude a confidence in our ability to do what is expected. We take initiative without getting approval at each step of the process; we see opportunities for improvement; and, we feel the job getting smaller and less daunting. Out of the ashes of uncertainty, fear of failure and just plain ignorance, we rise like the mythical Phoenix bird. As the great boxer, Muhammad Ali, once said, we are “not cocky, but confident”. We think that we know what we know.

But, alas, the next phase moves us back into the unconscious realm— more specifically, Unconscious Competence. Fact is that we don’t know all that we really know. So much of how we perform our jobs becomes rote, routine and automatic. This is revealed to us when we struggle to explain to people what we really do on a daily basis, and what our job really consists of and requires from us. We are in that phase where an objective party who has observed us can reveal us to ourselves. This is the phase where instincts informed by experiences kicks in to enhance our performance; this is where we begin to question how we “pulled it off”; this is where we are becoming a bit bored--because we have seen every business cycle, every seasonality surprise and every annual crisis. If not aware of what’s happening, we can easily slip into cynicism. We don’t have the time and/or patience to deal with those in the earlier phases of competency development. This is where we should be looking for new challenges. Look for challenges that involve a new role in the existing job. For example, consider becoming a mentor or  moving out of your comfort zone by transitioning to a different role.