three functional purposes for meetings

 …there are only three functional purposes for having a business meeting:

1. To inform and bring people up to speed.

2. To seek input from people.

3. To ask for approval.

Use this as a filter to determine why you are having a meeting and explain that purpose to your audience. Your meetings may often cut across multiple objectives but forcing yourself to clarify the agenda into these three purposes can result in more effective meetings.

Anthony K. Tjan

“The Key to Shorter, Better Meetings,” Harvard Business Review. June 23, 2009 as quoted in HBR Guide to Making Every Meeting Matter. Harvard Business Review Press. 2016.

agenda topics as questions

List agenda topics as questions the team needs to answer. Most agenda topics are simply several words strung together to form a phrase, for example: “office space reallocation.” This leaves meeting participants wondering, “What about office space reallocation?” When you list a topic as a question (or questions) to be answered, it instead reads like this: “Under what conditions, if any, should we reallocate office space?”

A question enables team members to better prepare for the discussion and to monitor whether their own and others’ comments are on track. During the meeting, anyone who thinks a comment is off-track can say something like, “I’m not seeing how your comment relates to the question we’re trying to answer. Can you help me understand the connection?” Finally, the team knows that when the question has been answered, the discussion is complete.

Roger Schwarz

“How to Design an Agenda for an Effective Meeting,” Harvard Business Review. March 19, 2015 as quoted in HBR Guide to Making Every Meeting Matter. Harvard Business Review Press. 2016.

what happened at the big meeting?

…we always ask the meeting owner—the most senior executive hosting it—the same two questions:

• What do you want to have debated, decided, or discovered at the end of this session that you and the team haven’t already debated, decided, or discovered?
• What do you want attendees to say when their team members ask, “What happened at the big meeting?”

In almost every case, the response is the same: “That’s a good question—I hadn’t actually thought about those things.”

It doesn’t matter if it’s an eight-person board meeting, a 15-person executive team meeting, or a 150-person leadership conference—your first step when planning an important one-off or non-routine get-together should be to draft an initial set of goals based on the answers to the two questions above. In the words of Stephen Covey, “Begin with the end in mind.”

Bob Frisch and Cary Greene

“If You Can’t Say What Your Meeting Will Accomplish, You Shouldn’t Have It,” Harvard Business Review. April 18, 2016 as quoted in HBR Guide to Making Every Meeting Matter. Harvard Business Review Press. 2016.

renaming meetings

Organizations are drowning in unproductive meetings, and part of the problem is the fact that we refer to them all in the same way. Vague and imprecise language obscures the true purpose of these gatherings, making it difficult to know how to optimize for their success. It also makes it harder to distinguish the worthwhile ones from the worthless.

In order to have fewer, more purposeful meetings, we need a more robust vocabulary to describe them. So let’s do some renaming, starting with three common “meetings” that you’ll soon realize aren’t really meetings at all.

• Meetings with just two people aren’t meetings. They’re conversations... 
• …sometimes people... huddle around a laptop or whiteboard to generate real work product together. Let’s call these group work sessions...
• ...meetings where the primary goal is to generate ideas… call it a brainstorm... 

Now let’s address a few types of meetings that are difficult to justify if you name them correctly.

• [Meetings] called primarily because managers have information to disseminate... These are convenience meetings  and almost always a bad idea. They’re typically convenient for the individual, and inconvenient for everyone else.
• Meetings called as a matter of tradition or habit — formality meetings — must also be banned... 
• Some meetings are called under the guise of collaboration or alignment, but it’s really connection we’re after. We can call these social meetings. 

Finally, we come to the decision-making meeting, a total misnomer as is it implies that the meeting itself is making the decision. But meetings don’t make decisions, leaders do. Group discussions can help support that process, of course, so let’s call them decision-supporting meetings to remind the leader that it’s her job, and hers alone, to make sure action follows...

Imagine a culture where people regularly talk about meetings using this kind of precise language. Picture someone pushing back on a meeting invitation by calling it a formality meeting... Better language isn’t the only step you must take to transform your meeting culture, but it’s a powerful start.

Al Pittampalli

“Stop Calling Every Conversation a “Meeting”,” Harvard Business Review. November 3, 2015 as quoted in HBR Guide to Making Every Meeting Matter. Harvard Business Review Press. 2016.

set an agenda

“Always set an agenda out ahead of time – and be clear about the purpose of the meeting.” It’s hard to imagine more sound advice about meetings. 

Amy Gallo

“The Condensed Guide to Running Meetings,” Harvard Business Review. July 6, 2015 as quoted in HBR Guide to Making Every Meeting Matter. Harvard Business Review Press. 2016.

their obvious delight

 

The thing I remember best about successful people I've met all through the years is their obvious delight in what they're doing... and it seems to have very little to do with worldly success. They just love what they're doing, and they love it in front of others. 

Fred Rodgers

The World According to Mister Rogers: Important Things to Remember. Hachette Books. 2003. P.42

A.D.K.A.R.

 

Awareness represents a person's understanding of the nature of change, why the change is being made and the risk of not changing. Awareness also includes information about the internal and external drivers that created the need for change, as well as "what's in it for me."

Desire represents the willingness to support and engage in a change. Desire is ultimately about personal choice, influenced by the nature of the change, by an individual's personal situation, as well as intrinsic motivators that are unique to each person.

Knowledge represents the information, training and education necessary to know how to change. Knowledge includes information about behaviors, processes, tools, systems, skills, job roles and techniques that are needed to implement a change. 

Ability represents the realization or execution of the change. Ability is turning knowledge into action. Ability is achieved when a person or group has demonstrated capability to implement the change at the required performance levels.

Reinforcement represents those internal and external factors that sustain a change. External reinforcements could include recognition, rewards and celebrations that are tied to the realization of the change. Internal reinforcements could be a person's internal satisfaction with his or her achievement or other benefits derived from the change on a personal level.

Jeffrey M. Hiatt

ADKAR: A Model for Change in Business, Government and our Community. 2006. Prosci Research. p.2,3

find a what, a who, and a why

We identified three big buckets of motivators: career, community, and cause.

Career is about work: having a job that provides autonomy, allows you to use your strengths, and promotes your learning and development. It’s at the heart of intrinsic motivation.

Community is about people: feeling respected, cared about, and recognized by others. It drives our sense of connection and belongingness.

Cause is about purpose: feeling that you make a meaningful impact, identifying with the organization’s mission, and believing that it does some good in the world. It’s a source of pride.

These three buckets make up what’s called the psychological contract — the unwritten expectations and obligations between employees and employers. When that contract is fulfilled, people bring their whole selves to work. But when it’s breached, people become less satisfied and committed. They contribute less. They perform worse.

In the past, organizations built entire cultures around just one aspect of the psychological contract. You could recruit, motivate, and retain people by promising a great career or a close-knit community or a meaningful cause. But we’ve found that many people want more. In our most recent survey, more than a quarter of Facebook employees rated all three buckets as important. They wanted a career and a community and a cause. And 90% of our people had a tie in importance between at least two of the three buckets... We’re all hoping to find a what, a who, and a why.

Lori Goler, Janelle Gale, Brynn Harrington, and Adam Grant

"The 3 Things Employees Really Want: Career, Community, Cause"  Harvard Business Review. February 20, 2018

establish a clear starting point

A vision is a statement about what the leadership agrees a company could reasonably stretch to be in a generation--a 30-year aspiration... if the statement doesn't contain "to be," it's not a vision statement. For example: "We wish to be the largest bicycle manufacturer in the United States as measured by sales within 30 years..."

"A mission is what you wish the company to be over the next three-to-five years." Again, it should contain "to be." Your mission sets a shorter-term agenda for steps that will allow you to someday achieve your vision...

"Objectives (interchangeable with 'goals') are what you want to have."

Not "be." "Have."

The key is to sift through all the possible metrics and KPIs to determine the goals that most define success. Dunkin's mission was to be "the dominant doughnut and coffee provider in each and every market" in which it competed. Its early objectives?

• To have earnings per share grow at 15-to-20 percent per year.
• To have store-level economics achieve at least a 15-percent return on investment on average.
• To have debt never total more than three times EBITDA...

Strategic initiatives are, "the four-to-six most important tasks an organization must execute in order to bridge ever-scarce resources to achieve stated objectives..."

Tactics are, "the four-to-six action steps needed to support the achievement of each department's strategic initiatives..."

Jeff Haden, quoting Robert Rosenberg - CEO of Dunkin' Donuts'

"Think Company Vision Statements Are a Waste of Time? How Dunkin' Donuts' CEO Created a Plan to Recover From Disaster," by Jeff Haden. Inc. Nov. 17, 2020

rules for happiness

Rules for Happiness: something to do, someone to love, something to hope for.

Attributed to Immanuel Kant

Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose. By Joe Biden. Flatiron Books. 2017. Preface

The real source of this quote may be George Washington Burnap in his book “The Sphere and Duties of Woman: A Course of Lectures” 1848. See post on Who Said That Really? on Tumbler. Dec 7th, 2013

purpose is the guardrail for actions

Purpose is the guardrail for actions. Change agility requires an answer to the question “Why?”, so that people can fight the natural instinct to resist change. The answer needs to tap into what’s meaningful and important, providing an irresistible invitation to come along. As CEO Shoei Yamana of Konica Minolta has said, “My belief is that people don’t work for numbers…they need to share the same belief that they are creating value in some way.” If you can’t articulate a clear purpose behind the changes being made, it’s unlikely that your employees will be able to implement them.

Edith Onderick-Harvey

5 Behaviors of Leaders Who Embrace Change. Harvard Business Review. May 18, 2018

work-life balance

A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.  -  L.P. Jacks

When people use the phrase "work-life balance," most of them imagine a seesaw or a scale. On one end is "work," and on the other end is "life." The two are linked in such a way that everything is a tradeoff. If work is up, life is down. If life is up, work is down.

More of one means less of the other.

This is insane.

"Work-life balance" implies that work is separate from living a life, or that it's something to be balanced against your life. That's strange, given that most people spend more time working every day than they do in any other activity. If all of those hours are not part of life, then something is deeply wrong.

Life and work are not two enemies battling for our limited attention. In fact, the opposite tends to be the case. When we have meaningful, fulfilling, purposeful work, it radiates through out lives. And when we have happy, secure, loving relationships, they, too, radiate through our lives. 

The balance we seek is not that of a seesaw, but of a symphony, Every element of a symphony has a role to play: sometimes loud, sometimes quiet, sometimes silent, sometimes solo. The balance we seek is not for every instrument to be played in moderation at every moment - that's just a long, boring honk - but for a complementary relationship where each instrument is played at the right pitch and the right intensity, with the right phrasing and the right tempo. 

At certain times, particular aspects of our lives come to the fore, while others fall into the background. As new harmonies emerge, we can create something beautiful.

"To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven."

Resilience: Hard-won Wisdom for Living a Better Life by Eric Greitens. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2015. p.257

not all pain matters

There are people whose attention is consistently drawn away from their purpose and toward their pain, like a moth to a light. Such people, who pay attention to every annoyance and obstacle in their way, are usually unsuccessful in their endeavors. In extreme cases they are mentally ill. A healthy person, a flourishing person, learns to move past a lot of annoyance and a good deal of pain.

Resilience: Hard-won Wisdom for Living a Better Life by Eric Greitens. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2015. p.168,169

even wounded and mistreated

Being hurt by life does not diminish our duty to others. Even wounded and mistreated, we owe to others the labor that can make our lives glorious. 

Resilience: Hard-won Wisdom for Living a Better Life by Eric Greitens. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2015. p.21

what is a personal calling?

What is a personal calling? It is God's blessing, it is the path that God chose for you here on Earth. Whenever we do something that fills us with enthusiasm, we are following our legend. However, we don't all have the courage to confront our own dream.

Why?

There are four obstacles. First: we are told from childhood onward that everything we want to do is impossible. We grow up with this idea, and as the years accumulate, so too do the layers of prejudice, fear, and guilt. There comes a time when our personal calling is so deeply buried in our soul as to be invisible. But it's still there.

If we have the courage to disinter dream, we are then faced by the second obstacle: love. We know what we want to do, but are afraid of hurting those around us by abandoning everything in order to pursue our dream. We do not realize that love is just a further impetus, not something that will prevent us going forward. We do not realize that those who genuinely wish us well want us to be happy and are prepared to accompany us on that journey.

Once we have accepted that love is a stimulus, we come up against the third obstacle: fear of the defeats we will meet on the path. We who fight for our dream suffer far more when it doesn't work out, because we cannot fall back on the old excuse: "Oh, well, I didn't really want it anyway." We do want it and know that we have staked everything on it and that the path of the personal calling is no easier than any other path, except that our whole heart is in this journey. Then, we warriors of light must be prepared to have patience in difficult times and to know that the Universe is conspiring in our favor, even though we may not understand how.

I ask myself: are defeats necessary?

Well, necessary or not, they happen. When we first begin fighting for our dream, we have no experience and make many mistakes. The secret of life, though, is to fall seven times and to get up eight times.

So, why is it so important to live our personal calling if we are only going to suffer more than other people?

Because once we have overcome the defeats - and we always do - we are filled by a greater sense of euphoria and confidence. In the silence of our hearts, we know that we are proving ourselves worthy of the miracle of life. Each day, each hour, is part of the good fight. We start to live with enthusiasm and pleasure. Intense, unexpected suffering passes more quickly than suffering that is apparently bearable; the latter goes on for years and, without our noticing, eats away at our soul, until, one day, we are no longer able to free ourselves from the bitterness and it stays with us for the rest of our lives.

Having disinterred our dream, having used the power of love to nurture it and spent many years living with the scars, we suddenly notice that what we always wanted is there, waiting for us, perhaps the very next day. Then comes the fourth obstacle: the fear of realizing the dream for which we fought all our lives.

Oscar Wilde said: "Each man kills the thing he loves." And it's true. The mere possibility of getting what we want fills the soul of the ordinary person with guilt. We look around at all those who have failed to get what they want and feel that we do not deserve to get what we want either. We forget about all the obstacles we overcame, all the suffering we endured, all the things we had to give up in order to get this far. I have known a lot of people, who, when their personal calling was within their grasp, went on to commit a series of stupid mistakes and never reached their goal - when it was only a step away.

This is the most dangerous of the obstacles because it has a kind of saintly aura about it: renouncing joy and conquest. But if you believe yourself worthy of the thing you fought so hard to get, then you become an instrument of God, you help the Soul of the World, and you understand why you are here.

Paulo Coelho

The Alchemist, HarperCollins 1993. p.x-xii

the behaviors of engaged teams

Engaged teams are productive, enthusiastic, and focused. But how can managers keep a pulse on their team when these are very subjective traits to measure?

Engaged teams and employees often:

• Confide in and show trust in their leadership team
• Identify problems and take on challenges proactively
• Work with a win-win mindset
• Provide better performance on day-to-day tasks
• Work with purpose and reevaluate priorities without instruction
• Challenge priorities and push back on assignments when they don’t see the value of them
• Collaborate with team members (and other departments) with a positive attitude

On the other side, disengaged teams and employees do the following:

• Shuffle responsibility from person to person
• Approach projects with a defeatist attitude
• Prioritize individual work over teamwork
• Fail to speak up or contribute during team meetings
• Come to one on ones without any agenda items 
• Fail to follow through on commitments

These are the telltale signs that something has gone awry. Yet, managers may not have the visibility to identify these signs early when managing remote and distributed teams. 

Marlo Oster

"How to Increase Remote Team Engagement" Workpatterns. December 10, 2020

laugh often and much

This [quote]... which is attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, has made such an impact on Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos that he hangs it up on his fridge.

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of the intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the beauty in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that one life has breathed easier because you lived here. This is to have succeeded.

These are the fruits you bear from a life well lived by consciously choosing to do the things you're passionate about -- the things you are called to do that make you "tap dance to work" every day, to borrow an expression from one of the many books about billionaire Warren Buffett.

Bezos can testify: "You don't choose your passions, your passions choose you," he once said. "All of us are gifted with certain passions, and the people who are lucky are the ones who get to follow those things."

Following your passions comes with added benefits: you love coming to work because you love what you do. Buffett said it best: "In the world of business, the people who are most successful are those who are doing what they love."

Marcel Schwantes

"According to Jeff Bezos, This May Be the Best Definition of Success He's Ever Read" Inc. April 24, 2020

the meaning of a sacrifice

Once, an elderly general practitioner consulted me because of his severe depression. He could not overcome the loss of his wife who had died two years before and whom he had loved above all else. Now, how can I help him? What should I tell him? Well, I refrained from telling him anything but instead confronted him with the question, “What would have happened, Doctor, if you had died first, and your wife would have had to survive you?” “Oh,” he said, “for her this would have been terrible; how she would have suffered!” Whereupon I replied, “You see, Doctor, such a suffering has been spared her, and it was you who have spared her this suffering — to be sure, at the price that now you have to survive and mourn her.” He said no word but shook my hand and calmly left my office. In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.

Viktor Frankl

Man's Search for Meaning. 1946.

originated in the soul of the universe

...."whoever you are, or whatever it is that you do, when you really want something, it's because that desire originated in the soul of the universe. It's your mission on earth." ...."And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it."

Paulo Coelho

The Alchemist, HarperCollins 1993. p.23

a language in the world that everyone understood

There was a language in the world that everyone understood, a language the boy had used throughout the time that he was trying to improve things at the shop. It was the language of enthusiasm, of things accomplished with love and purpose, and as part of a search for something believed in and desired.

Paulo Coelho

The Alchemist, Harper Collins 1993. p.64