I just finished another chapter in the book I am writing on Project Management. Please note that this is not proofed, edited, or re-read. Just put out there. Oh yes, the whole legal disclaimer - I own it, every single word and sweat and tear that went into it.
I hate Meetings, what a time sink
Let me be the first one to tell you that you are not alone. Okay, maybe I am probably the thousandth in a life time to tell you that. I am not sure if anyone really likes them. One day, I was walking by another Manager’s cubicle and I heard the loud grumbling of frustration and I couldn’t resist poking my head around the corner and asking them what was up.
“There needs to be a class for everyone in this organization on how to behave in a meeting” was the reply I received.
Uh oh, that didn’t sound very promising and I sat down and found myself exploring the subject of meetings, the good the bad and the ugly. What was the element that set them off? It was a couple of engineering/developer types who had taken the meeting on a series of tangents.
“But, that can’t one hundred percent be placed on their shoulders. The reality is that the meeting facilitator didn’t do a good job. We shouldn’t be training people how to behave in meetings; we need to train managers how to manage meetings.” I offered back
“You can’t manage these people, it is just bad behavior. What more needs to be said?”
“Let me guess you are talking about Dev Genius 1 an Engineer Genius 2? Right?”
“Yes…”
“I have had those two in meetings before, they are good guys but they are very passionate about what they do. There is a secret to dealing with them. I call them my ‘lock them into a room and shove pizza under the door’ geniuses. You just need to understand them and set guidelines for them. Have a talk with them before the meeting; talk with them about what your goals are for the meeting. Get them on your side. It is very simple, if they don’t respect you and trust you, they are going to take that meeting where they want to go. But, if they trust you they will work with you and the meeting will be successful.”
Lock them into a room geniuses – Every company/project has a couple of very key individuals to the organization, they are brilliant and their ability to resolve complicated technical issues is not only needed, but in a lot of cases mandatory for the success of the organization. But, they seem to have a problem getting along with people. They are considered abrupt, blunt, abrasive, condescending, etc. You are constantly dealing with the people they upset and/or offend at your desk complaining about them. You ask yourself on an almost daily basis, ‘are they worth it?’ The answer is, yes. However, you need to understand the care and feeding of these Geniuses and how you manage them. Each is very unique in the specific care and handling, but the one universal secret is: They need to respect and trust you and you have to understand them and respect them and be honest with them and sometimes even brutally blunt with them.
Never ask a question in a meeting that you don’t know the answer to
When I first started working as a consultant I worked at a very large music company and learned a lot of my personal philosophies about working and managing people from the people that I worked with. In some ways this was an excellent ground to get my feet wet as it was an environment that was very accepting of individuals, being real, and was tolerant of mistakes and helped mentor you through them. For someone like me who was not a people person, I needed that mentoring on finding myself and learning how to interact with other individuals. At the same point, it wasn’t an environment that translated well into corporate America. A work force that allows you to wear shorts to work be outspoken and out there in both behavior and speech also created bad habits that needed to be corrected almost on a daily basis in the real world.
But, some of the key items that I learned are elements that I still use today and they are some of the secrets of my success. One of those lessons is the ability to be in control of a meeting and appear to be knowledgeable and by doing so creates confidence in the people around you. To do that, though, you have to do your prep work. The following are some good rules to live by:
ü You should never go into a meeting without knowing what the different people thoughts or feelings are in regards to a specific subject – Some subjects are land mines and just touching upon them will set off an explosion that can completely derail the meeting. Talk to your key players pre-meeting, know what they like/dislike. Understand what they ‘believe’ the solution to be. Remember though in having these conversations, it is about them. Whether or not you agree or disagree doesn’t make a difference, you are there to remove your ego and listen and understand. This will allow you to lead into the topic in a meeting and know if you need to discuss it openly with all players or if you need to reference their concerns and table it for a discussion at another time and place. They feel like you are there for them and you are pro-active. Remember, never ask a question that you don’t know the answer to.
ü A meeting should be a well planned trip – Prior to the meeting make sure that you have prepared all the documentation and you are as well versed as all the people who are going to be in your car. Now decide what type of trip is it going to be, are you going to be working through an issue? Is it a formal meeting? Is the goal of the meeting actually to throw items at the white board and come away with the solutions to the world? Now plan out your road map and know what you are going to visit and how much time you have. Now that you are ready to start your trip, don’t forget to sit back and enjoy the trip. Sometimes you have to take detours and you are better off for it and sometimes all of the kids are out of control and you swear you will never go on a trip with these people again.
ü Do What you Say, Say What you Do – There is a part of me that says this should be its own chapter all by itself. People are not stupid, they do not want to be lied to, they do not want to be sold to. Don’t waste their time. When you promise to do something, do it. When other people promise to do something, hold them to it. Deal with everyone with integrity and hold them to the same level of integrity.
ü DOCUMENT! - So many people hold meetings and decisions are made, consensus ‘appears’ to occur, and you walk out the door and you have nothing or everyone goes away believing one thing but the reality is everyone heard something else. Re-iterate in the meeting what you ‘thought’ you heard. Document what you heard and send it out to everyone. Large decisions should all be formally documented and processes well defined and re-communicated in a follow up meeting. If you are doing it right and you are the host of a meeting, it is a lot of work. But, once you get your process and standard documentation in place, it is really quick and efficient and will save you a lot of time in the end.
How can you hold a meeting with 50 people accomplish something and end early?
A Program Level status meeting (in some places they call it a Core Team Lead Meeting) can include people from different departments and across the entire organization, potentially even other organizations. These meetings can be quite large and cumbersome. One Program I did had over 20 different departments and 65 people working on it, the status meeting was held on a weekly basis and included all the different teams and corporations involved.
These are not easy meetings to hold for several reasons. The first is that you have different personality types as they represent different parts of the organization. You have Operations which rather deal with more verbal/conceptual and you have Technology which is more black/white factual. QA wants to deal only with good/bad and marketing and training is all about impact. How can you hold a meeting of such complexity and have continued attendance over the entire project and be able to control it and make it valuable rather than lip service?
I apply the standard rules above to this meeting. I pre-prep a status report that is broken out by each area of responsibility/deliverable and any issues that are being tracked. I then hold pre-phone calls, check emails with all the appropriate people to get their updates/statuses in writing. I then fill out the status report with the updated information and have a history of the weekly status. I send this report out to all team members the day before the meeting. Now, when I am in the meeting, I can quickly go through the status and ask for updates from each team member. Yes, even though I have done all the prep work and know the answers to the questions, I force each team to be responsible for their areas report. Then I ask questions, I dig into their status. I know if any issues are touch points or affect other departments or deliverables and ask those people directly about those issues. I do this in a non-inflammatory way and make sure that I present equal treatment across all teams. I make this meeting a neutral zone for discussion, but also allow for peer pressure management for each team. They are holding themselves accountable to each other and to the project, not to me.
I keep the meeting moving, but also allow and encourage open discussion between teams. If an issue/update appears to need a large quantity of discussion, I will track that item and table it for either then end of the meeting or set up someone responsible for owning the issue and doing a follow up meeting.
Following this meeting I update all of the status reports and send them out to the Executive Committee as well as the entire Program.
Surprisingly, I can take a very complex project’s status meeting and make it occur within a one hour time frame. People will attend my meetings due to the fact I have a reputation of being effective and my meetings are valuable. This reputation is something you have to build in time but once you have it, you are on your way to being a very effective Program Manager.
Executive Committees/Peer Pressure Management
In large Programs/Projects it is important that you have Executive Ownership and a team that is set up to not only be your cheerleaders in the organization but also your internal governing body. They are there to offer advice, mentorship, direction, and insight into the organization and changes to it.
The Executive Committee should be set up with people at the Director level and above. They are normally the Directors over the different departments that are most impacted by the project. If you are on a political project, you should also include the VP’s of the main organizational areas (Technology projects would normally have both the Operational and Technology VP’s. A project that is affecting Change in the Organization would include the VP’s from the appropriate areas that are impacted.)
This committee also has an additional purpose and that is to allow for them to govern each other.
Each Project Manager will give an update on their area, you would have the Program Manager as the facilitator of these updates. The Program Manager should provide insight and more detail as necessary, they should highlight concerns and issues that cover each area, keeping the teams honest. This is the meeting where honesty and directness is most important; however it is also important to temper comments and insights with the understanding of the political impact. The Program Managers job is to remove their ego; they are the person who is available to take the heat for the entire Program. This abuse or unfair emphasis that they get is valuable as it allows each area’s executive to convey a message without creating a specific political pitfall by attacking another areas manager. Remember, it isn’t about you. (okay, sometimes it CAN be about you, remember to listen to the message and determine and self manage change in yourself as necessary).
This meeting is to get input from the Executives and for the Executives to resolve issues between themselves. This will occur naturally as long as you do your presentations in a manner that is not about grudges or your own agenda.
