The title: The Cure for Bad Meetings: Pay Attention and Contribute

This topic started life as a blog topic, but nothing beats repetition for driving a point home; changing mindsets and improving behavior!

The Key Point to Remember and Internalize:

You control your own behavior in meetings, and that behavior is infectious.

Examine your own actions to see if you are part of the problem:

• Arriving with a bad attitude about any particular meeting, tuning out the speaker, “enduring it”

Or the solution:

• Arriving with energy and engagement, setting a standard for participation that others can emulate

Positive and negative attitudes are equally contagious! What sort of behavior are you promoting through your own actions? Make sure you err on the side of “positive” as often as possible. You will find meetings easier to take, and even find value in them nine times out of ten!

Think about how much more productive all your meetings will be if you relentlessly approach each with a positive mindset focused on the following personal objectives:

• Support the organizer to achieve the meeting objective
• Keep the momentum moving forward (volunteer to “keep the clock” and keep people focused on the task at hand)
• Ask forward thinking, action-oriented questions that are germane to the topic
• Never use the meeting to advance a tangential agenda, score points or make a fellow employee look bad.

For more, click through to the article.

Let’s connect the marketplace to the workplace: These consumers who are so stingy with the trust they give to companies from which they buy are the same people who show up to work for you. They do not turn off their “trust mindset” just because they get a paycheck from you. Expect them to bring their personal attitudes about trust and reliability with them to work.

As a leader, you need to earn the trust employees put in you. Just as with a brand, the leader must build a reputation of being trustworthy and supportive before employees put their faith in that leader’s direction and actions.

Employee engagement rates that consistently register around 20% tells us that employee trust is very much NOT being earned by the leaders of organizations.

To better focus your energy on tackling this issue, think of your employees as “consumers of corporate culture.” They only buy into an organization’s mission once they trust in that mission. If you can sell them on your passion and get a reputation for caring about their well-being and success, they will start “buying your culture” in greater quantities.

What does buying more corporate culture look like?

• More energetic work on assigned tasks.
• Suggestions for doing tasks in better ways (more efficient, more profitable, more focused, etc.)
• Earlier arrivals and later departures without being asked.
• Shorter breaks.
• Active participation in innovative processes.
• More energetic, productive meetings (and usually shorter)
• Fewer “mental health” days taken off

All this simply because you earned their trust, and got them to buy more fully into what you are trying to accomplish. Because you delivered consistently on your promises of clear direction and support, they chose to make your “leadership brand” their own, just as they do with the products and services they buy for their personal use.

Building trust starts with clear, honest communication. It struck me as I read the Nielsen study’s results how much a consumer’s trust related to how employees come to trust their leaders (or not). This phrase seems very relevant to employees: “… the consumer (expects to see high relevance to them when) actively seeking information (about products or services.)” The survey emphasized that there is still much potential for organizations looking to reach the right audience…to earn trust with more honest communication.

Relate this to the workplace: Organizations trying to communicate effectively need to relate the information they share (and the instructions they give) to the employee’s own work environment. This helps employees better understand why they are working on given tasks, which allows them to approach all tasks more strategically, and therefore more productively.

Leaders can’t expect employees to trust them “just because.”

• Consumers of corporate culture do need answers to the questions “what’s the benefit to me of working harder?” before they unlock the full scope of their energy and apply it to work.
• They also need to trust that the answers to that question are honest!
• To get there, leaders must start by adopting a consistently engaging and empowering leadership mindset to build the unshakable trust among employees that generates high levels of productivity.

Trust is earned. Consumers tell us that constantly. Yet we don’t make the obvious connection that these consumers are the people who come to work for us every day!

Edits we would make (open the article to follow along as we go down the list):

Under Body Language, point 8 recommends that you “always smile.” This is way too broad. Smile only when appropriate, and when you can do it genuinely. False smiles at serious moments can strike the person with whom you are talking as condescending, even if you don’t mean to be.

Meeting deadlines: This whole section is missing the critical step of getting buy-in on your goals from team members. Everyone is more efficient if they own a piece of the decision-making process and agree on the goals you choose. You don’t have to govern by consensus, but you do have to invite participation and contribution to the planning and innovation processes.

Getting along with employees: Point 31 says “provide motivation”: Easy to say, hard to do if you can’t pay them a lot of money and let them run their own day. Ask for input from employees about how together you can build a sustainable engaged corporate culture.

• It bugs us (a lot) that “listening” does not appear in this section.

Manage yourself: Most of these points (especially 33-36 and 40-43) support our philosophy of Pursuit of Truth. This is a critical leadership success factor for sustaining employee engagement and innovation.

Under Boosting Productivity, #45 needs work: Making meetings productive is more than just being “organized and prepared.” Meetings only have value if the agenda is short, forward-thinking and action-oriented. NO UPDATES. Deliver those by e-mail and require that they be read before the meeting starts.

Point 46, on the other hand, about keeping important tasks ahead of simply easy tasks, is critical. Against that, point 55 about doing the hard tasks first only works when you keep it subordinate to #46.

In Managing Finances and Resources, #61 about well-compensated employees must be clarified: Good pay is only part of the answer. Once people’s basic financing needs are met, they actually look as much for non-financial compensation such as extra paid-time-off, participation in strategic initiatives, and public recognition for what they accomplish. (Click here for more of our thoughts on compensation.)

At last! Under Point #74 we find “Listen attentively”. It is a crime to bury listening way down here under “customers.” This should show up under every section , especially under “Getting Along With Employees”.

Going above and beyond: Here we finally get to our favorite topic: Transformational Leadership! We think points 93-101 should be an integral part of how you lead, not “above and beyond.” (For more on this critical topic, click here.) This section just scratches the surface of the difference between transactional and transformational leadership. Leaders who make the leap from the former to the latter truly rise above the rest!

The distinction is critical, because a leader who is transactional gets stuff done, but does not inspire his or her followers to go above and beyond their assigned tasks to exceed expectations and sustainably improve productivity.

Our Co-Founder, David Tighe, recently had a article about our Transformational Leadership philosophy accepted for posting on eZineArticles.com. We recommend it as a great summary on why any organization should prioritize the creation of transformational leaders within its ranks, and how individual managers can transform themselves pretty quickly without waiting for the blessings of senior management.

What follows are a few highlights from the full article:

We emphasize “transformation” in an effort to distinguish “transactional leaders” from leaders who innovate, engage, encourage and motivate (the last two are not the same) their teams to perform at higher levels consistently. Not for a month, or a special project, but all the time.

• The verb “transact” implies getting a series of tasks done. Most leaders who show up get this far. Transactional leaders drive performance. They focus on results, and “accomplish what they can” with limited time and resources.
• The verb “transform” captures what a leader must do to create a fully engaged, highly productive and innovative workforce. Transformational leaders also focus on results, but solve the limited resource problem by unlocking extra productivity within their team, engaging fully with them to tap more of the capabilities, energy and desire inherent in each team member.

Moving from “transact” to “transform” is the hard part of leadership, and is the leap that so many assigned leaders (those in official leadership roles) fail to make.

This failure is not from a lack of desire to be the best. Most people want to succeed and earn recognition for what they achieve. But, if their organization does not provide the training, tools and permission to build a sustainably productive culture, team leaders will not make the transition from transactional to transformational.

If you want to become a transformational leader within your organization, start by adopting a more engaging communication style that is founded on personal responsibility and is action-oriented:

Eliminate the “Blame Game”:

• Take the lead in identifying and interceding in conversations that involve blame or adopt “victim status”. Teach your team members to drop the need to assign blame and adopt instead your forward-focused mindset.
• Redirect the energy in the group by asking “What can we do now?” We call this “keeping a next-action focus.” It is your job to train everyone to adopt that mindset permanently.
• Publicly accept personal responsibility for any results, good or bad. Challenge your people to do the same, and never stop leading by example.

Open up Communications:

• Stop directing, start listening and supporting. If you are always doing the talking, you will never hear about a problem, or a new idea.
• Expand your definition of “need to know.” Engaged employees need to know a lot about the company’s goals, its limitations, and the truth behind those energy-sapping rumors. Employees work harder if they know how their piece of the puzzle fits strategically.

Communicate with a “next-action focus”:

• In meetings, define desired outcomes for each discussion
• Turn every discussion you have about work from cause of problems to what to do next
• Finish each meeting with a summary of mutually agreed actions
• Follow up based on these actions. You must be reliable and predictable in applying these habits to all your co-worker interactions.

For more details, click through to the article.

You cannot be fully effective as a manager of people or projects unless you inject passion into your work, and instill that passion to those with which you work. Adopting a transformational leadership style allows you to more clearly communicate that you care about your people and their success, collaborate more effectively with them, and therefore transfer your passion to them. A win-win all around every time!

Banish boredom by paying attention and participating!!!

This advice pops into our mind because our marketing guru received this diatribe from the market research publisher Quirks. It captured very nicely the horrifying impact smartphones and iPad-like devices have had on workplace meetings. The experience the writer described is way too common in business today, and must be eradicated if we are to maintain productivity.

You can banish boredom all by yourself and it is easier than you think. Simply engage fully in the content being presented. Don’t distract yourself with e-mail management or other off-task activities. Choose to pay close attention, and actively participate in discussions.

• Assume you will hear something new and useful every time, even if you have heard the presentation before. Volunteer to take notes, if that keeps you fully engaged.
• Turn off your electronic equipment every time. If you are “on deadline” or “on call,” don’t come to the meeting. Being physically present is useless without being mentally present. It is OK to ask beforehand if you really need to be there.
• Challenge yourself to keep an open mind, and “check your assumptions and preconceived notions at the door.”
• Make constructive comments. Never snipe, or use the poor presenter to score points in front of your boss.
• Challenge assumptions in a substantial way. Never disparage any well-intentioned contributions to the conversation.
• Never hijack a meeting from the presenter. Let that person retain control while offering your input.
• Give ground when reasonable arguments are presented in opposition to your view. This is not a sign of weakness, it is a sign of character and an ability to adapt and grow.

Any meeting can be turned into a useful event if a constructive conversation breaks out that is forward-thinking (what should we do from here?) and action-oriented (how best to do those things?). You can instigate these constructive conversations!

Solve your boredom by engaging fully in the content. Be the person on your team that magically turns meetings from dead zones to constructive events! Our twenty-five years of experience tells us that if you do take this “high road” others will see the results and start to adopt your behavior.

Comic source credit: We found the comic above at http://blog.somepixels.net/2012/03/meetings/

“They need to know you care, before they care what you know.”

Put another way:

“Are you really here to help us, or are you just going through the motions and don’t really care what happens to us?”

It reminds me that this does not just apply to a public official in front of a microphone during a disaster. It is what each of us needs to do every day when building productive professional relationships with your fellow employees, be they bosses, peers or subordinates.

All people need to know we value them and their contributions before they can maximize their productivity. Few of us run entirely on internal measures of satisfaction. We need regular feedback and confirmation that what we do each day is contributing to shared goals, and is appreciated.

Human Development Consultants (including us) tell clients constantly: Recognition is not expensive. A heartfelt “thank you” that is truly meant and energetically delivered is all many people need to keep their own energy and contribution level up.

To use an analogy that isn’t perfect, but makes the point: Parents care deeply about their children’s well-being, and work hard to raise good citizens able to navigate society successfully as adults. How do they show this deep caring? Good parents set standards and demand performance, while simultaneously providing advice and encouragement. Parents also provide a safe place to make mistakes and learn tough lessons without fear that failure carries dire consequences. Unconstructive behavior has bad consequences, but constructive effort that fails does not. Innovation is prized and encouraged, too.

So it is with the workplace. The adults you pay to work for you are people, and they all have a need to be valued and encouraged. They also need standards that guide their behavior and define their success. It is your job as a leader to provide that environment in a constructive, collaborative way. That starts with truly caring about the development and success of each member of your team (and anyone else with whom you work!)

• Focus on uncovering the passions of your employees.
• Spend time asking what system of rewards strikes them as reasonable.
• Validate to them that these passions and recognition needs are reasonable.
• If what you uncover is tangential to the needs of the team, explore how to redirect the employee’s energy more productively.
• Let the employee lead that discussion, with your active participation to keep it headed in the right direction.
• Make sure ‘the right direction’ really is the direction that builds organizational productivity. Work with your own bosses on that.
• Make this the foundational part of your job, not just a check-off box on your to-do list. If you say you care, you must really care. (If you don’t care, get a job where you can care!)

Bosses in the past have said to subordinates (I have heard this myself): Your job is to make me look good. That sounds self-centered, but has a foundation of truth. If we work to make each other highly productive, we will all look good to senior executives. That leads to organizational rewards, whatever those may be!

Article Links:
Capitol Ideas

image courtesy Carreesma blog

Most disgruntled employees don’t quit. Dissatisfied as they may seem to be, they keep showing up for work and don’t seem to edging for the exit to find another job.

This is a tremendous boon to companies that make a commitment to employee engagement, because the people in charge of “creating engagement” have time to get it done properly, and will therefore reap the benefits in greater productivity and retention.

A recent article in the Harvard Business Review by Daniel Gulati brought this back to the top of our mind. At Bovo-Tighe our operating assumption, based on over 25 years of nurturing talent and unlocking hidden reservoirs of energy, is that an overwhelming majority of people are capable of performing at a high level, but are misdirected, under-motivated or mis-matched with their responsibilities. Indeed, most people — 80% according to Deloitte’s Shift Index survey, among other research – are dissatisfied with their jobs.

Why don’t more people actively seek greener pastures?

• Sometimes the money is too good – Witness the thousands of people who slave away in businesses like investment banking, working 80-100 hours a week for a nice base salary and the promise of a big bonus. Money may not buy happiness, but it does buy a comfortable lifestyle that seduces the employee to stay.
• On the other end of the pay scale, a percentage (by no means all) of public school teachers who may have lost the passion keep plugging away, marking time until they can retire, because that guarantees them a decent retirement.
• In corporate America, loss aversion plays a role: When someone else is paying your salary and providing health benefits, that provides a high level of personal financial security. Quitting threatens that.
• Even during the recent economic downturn, being unemployed marked you as less worthy, damaged goods, etc. People fear that social demotion.
• Compounding that point, the advice most of us get from our elders is “Never leave a job before you have another one lined up.”
• An aspiring entrepreneur cannot attract the capital he or she needs to launch their own venture. The traditional sources of family and friends have dried up: Home equity has evaporated, and over 11 million homeowners are underwater (owe more than the house is worth.) Stock portfolios have rebounded, but only back to levels previously achieved, and no one is feeling rich.

And, employees can put blinders on, and divert themselves with small accomplishments that make the burden of work more bearable. In his HBR article, Gulati captured it this way:

“I’ve found that a sharp focus on incremental gains (leads) to “premature optimization.” Instead of surveying the landscape and climbing the highest mountain possible, we’re too busy scaling the first peak we happen to stumble upon. Many of the individuals I interviewed displayed a sharp tendency to prematurely optimize, rather than to explore their options and start the climb to higher heights. One stated, “I’ll figure it out after I get promoted.” Another said, “one more month,” for eleven months in a row (and counting). As a whole, the group displayed a distinct preference for hitting just another small milestone, rather than starting from the bottom of a different (but potentially more lucrative) mountain altogether. This strong human bias toward accumulating small wins is what we call progress, but paradoxically, it seems to be inhibiting many individuals from reaching their true potential.”

That is, they willfully focus on the trees so that they don’t have to face the reality of the forest!

All this is why few unhappy employees muster up the courage to change careers. They opt to bear up under the strain of sticking to what doesn’t make them happy, but keeps them secure. In their view, quitting a bad situation carries high risk.

This is a tremendous opportunity for human resources to shine as engines of employee engagement and retention: You have a captive audience that is anxious to solve the problem without leaving the security of their jobs. These employees may not admit it up front, and they will be grumpy about the process (cynics, all), but they REALLY WANT YOU TO SUCCEED in your mission of achieving full engagement, because it will reconnect them to the passion they once brought to work, increase their personal self-worth, and massively improve their productivity.

What are you waiting for? Let’s get your folks moving again!

Links:

Harvard Business Review Blog

Deloitte Edge Report

In this post we share another article that we found useful for our own skill-sharpening exercises in 2011. Earlier we shared an article that examined how power may lead leaders astray, even unintentionally. Today, we tackle the same topic from a different angle: How the unwitting expression of power through behavior can negatively impact team productivity and innovation.

In a nicely titled paper, “When Power Makes Others Speechless,” Francesco Gina, and her colleagues Leigh Plunkett Tost of the University of Washington and Richard P. Larrick of Duke University explore how a strong personality in a position of power can overwhelm subordinates and keep them from making productive contributions to decision-making processes.

Here is what caught our eye in the executive summary and made us read further:

“History has shown that possessing a great deal of power does not necessarily make someone a good leader. This paper explores the idea that power actually has a detrimental effect on leadership, especially with regard to how it affects open communication within a team.”

“…we argue that a leader’s experience of heightened power produces verbal dominance, which reduces perceptions of leader openness and team open communication. Consequently, there is a negative effect of leader power on team performance.”

This tendency of power to blind a leader to the value of other contributors is not new. It is one reason we at Bovo-Tighe are constantly being brought in to run communication style workshops and leadership training.

Here is how Gina et al. described “power” in a leadership context:

“Power refers to an individual’s relative ability to control others’ outcomes, experiences, or behaviors while leadership refers to the process of influencing others to pursue group goals…These definitions seem to imply…that increased leader power can be expected to increase leader effectiveness and, consequently, team performance.”

Unfortunately, as the authors point out (and we know from experience), there is no direct correlation between productivity and the amount of power the leader is given. High productivity depends on how that leader wields the power he or she is given.

“Leaders cannot simply appeal to their power to elicit performance,” concluded the authors. “Instead, performance must be cultivated by creating a team context that facilitates high levels of performance. Team performance is dependent upon a variety of factors that cannot be directly affected by a leader’s exercise of power.”

Here is where we see an echo of Professor George’s commentary, that we noted in our last post:

“The psychological experience of power leads powerholders … to be less adept at understanding the perspectives of others…and to rely more heavily on stereotyping” rather than taking the time to understand each person’s talents or input individually.

Gina, et al., wrote a research paper, so it can be heavy going working through the buzzwords, but the point remains: The power inherent in a leadership position can corrupt the individual’s ability to relate productively to those subordinate to them.

Now you might say “we know this. We have all sat in meetings with blowhards who don’t let you get a word in edgewise, or just like to hear themselves talk.”

What the authors found is that such behavior is not always deliberate. It can be an unconscious result of the personal confidence perceived power gives people, and often (very often in our experience) training to make the powerholder aware of their behavior, and how it stifles contribution, cures the malady almost overnight.

Managers who wish to be good leaders need to understand how their behavior is perceived by others. They need to understand how the power that is ascribed to their position by the organization can inhibit productive collaborations with peers and subordinates, unless they keep the power of their position from going to their head. If we take the time to educate leaders on the effect their behavior has on others, it is usually possible to get the leader to adapt a mindset of acting more collegially and inclusively without losing personal confidence. This simple change can foster more active information sharing throughout the team, and lead to better decisions and productivity. This will reflect well on the leader, and validate the new mindset on an ongoing basis!

The best intentioned new leader can “lose his way” as the comforts of power and prestige create a mindset of elevated personal talent and knowledge. We work hard in all of our leadership training to break this mindset, as an elevated sense of self-worth is usually counterproductive in building a highly productive relationships with co-workers.

We found support for our position in an opinion piece posted by Harvard Business School Professor Bill George. In it, George notes that as people settle into leadership roles, their behavior gets more outwardly confident, which can lead leaders to overwhelm their subordinates and wall themselves off from reality (or “the truth” as we often call it here at Bovo-Tighe.)

The leadership trap

What we like about George’s thinking is that he emphasizes that this behavior on the part of the leader is not a conscious act: It results simply through the power of the leaders’ own confidence and how they present themselves in public. Strength of conviction and personality are key drivers of how executives rise through the ranks (results aside) so you cannot disconnect that energy and commitment from how a manager chooses to lead. However, that person must learn to step outside their own head regularly to assess how their behavior affects the productivity of his or her team, and how much it may inhibit what we call Foundations of Excellence (that is: Unshakable Trust, the Pursuit of Truth and Communication that Counts.)

“Leaders who lose their way are not necessarily bad people,” writes George. “Rather, they lose their moral bearings, often yielding to seductions in their paths. Very few people go into leadership roles to cheat or do evil, yet we all have the capacity for actions we deeply regret unless we stay grounded.”

While most people value fair compensation for their accomplishments, few leaders start out seeking only money, power, and prestige. Along the way, the rewards—bonus checks, newspaper articles, perks, and stock appreciation—fuel increasing desires for more.

This, concludes George, creates a deep desire to keep it going, sometimes even to the point of breaching the ethical standards that previously governed their conduct.

George found a good quote from Novartis chairman Daniel Vasella (told Fortune magazine):

“…for many of us the idea of being a successful manager—leading the company from peak to peak, delivering the goods quarter by quarter—is an intoxicating one. It is a pattern of celebration leading to belief, leading to distortion. When you achieve good results… you are typically celebrated, and you begin to believe that the figure at the center of all that champagne-toasting is yourself.”

The key point that George makes that we liked: “When leaders focus on external gratification instead of inner satisfaction, they lose their grounding (which leads them to) reject the honest critic who speaks truth to power.”

Self-reflection: A path to more effective leadership

George notes that an executive that is able to keep the right perspective of his or her role within the organization will generate more productive work from those with whom the executive works. We agree. Keeping leaders grounded is a core principle of Bovo-Tighe, and that includes making them more aware of how their outward behavior affects . It keeps their focus outward, on the collective goals and accomplishments of the organizations. It leads to the sharing of credit and rewards, and keeps an attitude of “first among equals.” Great leaders understand that everyone on their team is both responsible for actions and results, and should participate in the rewards.

Executives cannot best accomplish this self-reflection alone, however. That is where great coaching and mentoring play a strong role, and where HR plays an active role in the process.

In every organization there must be a hierarchy in a decision-making process, but the people within that hierarchy must all maintain a mindset that they are not infalliable, that everyone can contribute meaningfully to making progress, and that titles by themselves do not confer extra talent or ability on anyone.

Professor George has a lot more to say about the psychology of leaders who had to fight and scrap to get to the top, and he gets a bit hyperbolic in his descriptions, but overall gave us a good reminder about how leaders must work hard to stay grounded and (relatively) humble in how they handle their responsibilities if they want to receive the maximum contribution from those with whom they work.

Here is a great post from the i4cp TrendWatcher that we find useful in discussing employee engagement initiatives with clients:

The link to the post.

The short version is that honesty and transparency in unsettled times pays off in spades for organizations. I4cp completed a survey that assessed relative openness of communication for the companies that participated in the survey. You will see in the summary chart below that high-performing organizations communicate better.

Source: i4cp TrendWatcher Blog

To quote from the blog:

“It goes without saying that – especially in times of economic uncertainty – employees want honest, straightforward information from the top. Frequent, transparent communication such as updates about the financial status of the organization, M&A plans and the road ahead can help keep employees engaged rather than distracted by worrying about what is going on. Employee-generated rumors move faster and farther through an organization than any official communication could hope to, so preemptive messaging can help slow or stop misinformation altogether.”

Companies that fear a “stampede to the exits,” a drop in stock price or simply decreased productivity if they share anything but good news with their organization are on the wrong side of business history.

Indeed, if bad news is honestly shared, it is more likely to energize employees to help save the day, either by redoubling efforts, sharing fresh ideas they were afraid to share before, and other productivity enhancers.

“We are all in this together” is a trite phrase, but organizations that truly communicate with employees build trust and loyalty, and make that phrase ring true!