Little Leadership

Meetings are Not Pop Quizzes

Let’s say I’m a coworker of yours. I send you an email with no subject line, and you aren’t using a preview pane in your email reader. You have no idea why I’m contacting you. You know that the email is from me, you know when the message was received, you know that it’s not a high or low priority message, and that’s it.

How do you evaluate this message? It might be critical. You might need to respond in the next five minutes, or it might be something you can get to on Friday. Or it might contain a question outside of your domain… but you might know the person who can answer it. How can you possibly know what to do with this communication?

The short answer: you can’t – at least not quickly. You need to open up the message, scan or read it, and evaluate further. This message is now taking up actual work time… all because it didn’t provide the right information.
Sure, you might not send an email without a subject line. But are you sending meeting invitations without agendas?

Clues

We have a myriad ways to contact people. Many of these inputs (email messages, instant messages, phone calls) can provide context to their importance and purpose but all too often I see meeting invitations fail to live up to these standards.

Just a few weeks ago I received a meeting invite with a subject and absolutely no notes. I had worked on a project related to the subject, but had never worked with the meeting organizer before and in fact didn’t know who she was. There were three peers in this meeting with me. I asked the organizer to send an agenda, but ultimately she didn’t.

I chatted with one of the other attendees and asked him what the meeting was all about. “I don’t know, and I hoped you knew!” he said. He was as confused as I was! So here we were heading into this meeting as if it were a pop quiz. We knew the subject, but how could we possibly prepare for it?

Meetings without agendas force the participants to assess priority and the purpose of the meeting without any real tools to do so. Very unfair.

Agenda Deployment Time

This prompted me to look back at some of my own meetings from the past month and, admittedly, I found a few without notes in the invite. How embarrassing. Worse, as time had passed since these meetings I had very limited context around them just by looking at my calendar. Luckily I had taken notes, but not every meeting is so lucky.

To clean up this blunder I chose to carve out a small block of time each week: “Agenda Deployment Time.” For me it worked best as the first item on my calendar every Monday at 9am. My process was straightforward: review my week’s meetings and ask, “Does every meeting have a clear agenda?”

If a meeting I called didn’t have an agenda, I would either create one or cancel the meeting. Similarly, if I was invited to an agenda-less meeting I’d contact the organizer by email or phone and ask for one.

Within a few weeks I fully incorporated agenda creation into my normal meeting invitation process; at that point I felt comfortable canceling Agenda Deployment Time and reallocating it to Complain About Office Coffee Time.

Respect

Providing an agenda says, “I know your time is valuable, and I respect you.”

The example at the outset involving an email message may seem simple but even it carries a time cost. Meetings up the stakes considerably, as they include the preparation and action items in addition to the actual meeting itself.

As we think about improving communication on the path to leadership, we can’t forget the day to day interactions that really build our brand and credibility. I encourage you to look at your meeting invites and evaluate how effective they really are.

Leading your leader

When you are not at the top of the pyramid, you may recognize critical changes before your leader.  In these instances it is helpful to know how to appropriately influence your leader to make the right course correction while still maintaining unity in the team or organization.  The following points will help you develop an influencing relationship with your leader.

Earn their trust

Whether you know it or not, you have a brand. Every time you interact with someone they form an opinion of you.  Additionally, every time they hear your name associated with something they further establish their feelings on your brand.  Their personal image of your brand can be difficult to change once established.

This concept of brand is critical to influencing your leader.  They need to know that the information you are providing can be relied upon – in essence, it will positively contribute to their personal brand.  You need to consistently demonstrate that you understand and deliver on the needs of your leader.

But that is only part of the trust-earning process.  Leaders validate their personal perspectives through established trusting relationships.  If your leader receives positive feedback about you from a trusted friend, they will make a note in their mental trust log.  You also need to develop trusting relationships with those your leader trusts.

Evaluate the timing

Once you have the trust of your leader and have an idea you feel they should consider, you need to find the right time to introduce the idea.  Your timing flexibility depends on the severity of the issue.  If a change is critical you need to contact your leader immediately.  Other changes can be planned more strategically.  The basic idea, though, is to introduce the change to current plans when it matters most to your leader.

Finding the right time is not always easy and can require persistence.  Your leader is very busy with other issues.  If your idea will help them get closer to their goals faster, they will be interested when the time is right.  Watch your leader to see when they take their breaks.  Understand their schedule and up-coming activities that could demand their time.  Find a moment when they are taking a mental reprieve and have time to chat.  Schedule some time with them during their break, but also being considerate of their need for a break.

Be persistent

Depending on the timing, your leader may not be prepared for your idea.  That’s fine.  Seldom will you actually catch them at the perfect moment.  What’s more, some ideas need to be introduced with some time to bake in your leader’s mind before they are prepared to discuss them.

Consequently you need to be considerately persistent.  If your leader didn’t accept your idea initially, evaluate another appropriate time and bring it up again.  Your leader may have mentioned flaws in your idea at your initial introduction.  Find solutions to these flaws before your next discussion.  Consider changing your approach to highlight different procedures or solutions to see what resonates best.

Shelve ideas that don’t get traction

Finally, you also need to realize that your idea may not be appropriate for the leader’s current plan – or even not appropriate for their future plans.  If your leader consistently turns down your idea, evaluate why.  Be willing to put it on the shelf to be discussed later.  Likewise be willing to shelve it permanently.  You will have another idea soon enough that will help you forget about your shelved idea.

Moving the pyramid

Companies are often compared to pyramids with the CEO at the top and all the people who handle the day-to-day operations at the bottom. Depending on the hierarchy of the business, this pyramid can appear tall and thin or short and wide. But either way, it provides an appropriate analogy for understanding leadership.

So much of leadership relies on persuasion. In order to get someone to commit to your idea you must first persuade them to believe in it. Getting commitment is the challenge from any level in the organization. At the bottom, many of the challenges arise from limited visibility into the company strategy and market forces on the company. Furthermore, moving the pyramid requires tight coordination between peers and all the layers above. Such coordination at a bottom layer, while still performing daily responsibilities, is typically so arduous that few have the time and stamina to do it well.

Additionally there are challenges at higher layers in the pyramid. Although progress can often still be made on moving the pyramid without commitment from all layers, lack of commitment can destroy the pyramid’s migration mid-flight. A senior-level manager can use his authority to kick off a project, but the same authority that can force progress will also frequently prevent feedback. Employees at the bottom of the pyramid, if left to feel undervalued, will seldom report problems up the chain. The process that did not value their commitment sufficiently prior to project kick-off will leave them feeling their continued feedback is similarly unimportant.

Leadership happens at all levels

I met recently with one of my leadership groups to discuss an article we had recently read. We talked about the leadership and management techniques it proposed, then attempted to apply them back to our individual situations in our company. The discussion was going really well, until someone observed, “has anyone else noticed that we have just spent the last 30 minutes talking about things we have no control over?”

It was true. We had verbally solved all kinds of company issues. The problem was, we had little ability to actually apply our solutions. At least not in the methods we’d discussed.

The challenge was we had approached the problems from the vantage point of the article. As with most leadership and management articles, the author had approached the solution from the perspective of a leader at the top of the organization.

While senior management have definite leadership responsibilities that warrant the breadth of literature targeting their challenges, there is very little guidance for the many more leaders, several levels lower, tasked with implementing their grand strategies.

Hopefully this site will provide a venue to share experiences and tools to start bridging this gap.