How to do you feel about most of the meetings you attend? Are they productive, or generally considered a waste of time? Do you attend too many meetings? How do others value the meetings you run? If you are like most managers we know, your experience in running and participating in meetings is less than ideal.

Today’s show is the first of 2 or 3 shows to focus on running effective meetings. If you follow the guidelines we present here, your meeting will be much more effective, you’ll have less of them, and your individual and organizational performance will soar. And, it’s not hard!

A detailed outline of the podcast is located here. In addition, we’ve also provided you a Meeting Agenda Template that implements the guidelines we’ve discussed on today’s show.

Today we cover the second in our series on effective meetings.

A detailed outline of this week’s and last week’s podcast is located here. Also, be sure to check out the Meeting Agenda Template. We think you’ll find the template useful in improving the effectiveness of your meetings.

Today we wrap-up our conversation on effective meetings, as well as answer some listener questions on meetings, one-on-ones, and feedback.

This week we recur to a theme we started a while ago, management communications. If you don’t remember, we won’t be surprised - it was September, and we barely scratched the surface of presenting with PowerPoint.

There are so many topics to cover, we’re just now getting back to management communications. One of the reasons was our just concluded FOUR part series on performance reviews. We hope that the timing of that helped you be HIGHLY effective this month.

While we ARE going to talk about communications this week, we’re going to discuss a topic that most of you give almost no thought to: communication plans.

What do we mean by communications plans? What we mean is, how do you, as a manager, intend to have your organization understand your team’s plans, strategies and operations? If you immediately jump to “email and a meeting”, you’re not thinking effectively. Have you ever even THOUGHT about having a PLAN or PROCESS for thinking about HOW to communicate with your team?

Here’s what we bet. We bet that you communicate on autopilot. You don’t think AT ALL about HOW to communicate… you think about WHAT you’re going to communicate, and then use the most basic defaults to get your message across.

In fact, we would argue that you NEVER think about communicating other than presentations with PowerPoint. You don’t THINK about communicating… you just DO communicating. The problem with that is, if you don’t ever think about it, you WILL NEVER GET BETTER.

How do you know if you’re on autopilot? Let’s say you want everyone on your team to know something. If you think pretty quickly, email! You’re on autopilot. If you say, well, wait. If I have a meeting coming up, I might put it on the agenda, you’re STILL on autopilot. If, on the other hand, you have something to tell an individual, whether it comes from your boss or not, you think, one on one or poke your head into their cube, you’re on autopilot.

By the way, “telling everybody something” is called, in the communications planning world, “broadcasting”… and telling just one person something is “narrowcasting.”

Now look, we’re not saying these defaults don’t work pretty well most of the time. They do. But there are two dangers with them. First, if something unique or special requires communicating, and you’re operating on autopilot without even a hint of being most effective in your communications, you run the risk of the WAY you’re communicating affecting the quality of your message. Putting it in systems language, your poor PROCESS is affecting your CONTENT. What today’s cast about is the PROCESS of communicating, versus the content.

The second danger is that if you don’t think about communicating as a PROCESS, your ability to communicate as you gain managerial responsibilities will break down. If you just take communicating for granted, when you become a director or junior Vice President, and now have to rely on managers and others to carry your messages to your entire organization, you WILL NOT BE ABLE TO DO IT. You’ve got to have more tricks in your bag as you climb the org structure.

This inability to communicate is one of the biggest frustrations of senior executives we know. They often describe their jobs as “swimming” or “running in oatmeal”, because it takes so long to get the word out, and then “people still don’t get it”.

During the podcast, we make reference to a Sample Communications Plan to assist you in planning your communications more effectively. Use this tool to immediately increase the effectiveness of your managerial communications. You may download it here.

In this show, we’re going to talk about the simplest, most elegant tool we know of to make something you do at work more efficient and more effective.

Once we explain it, you’ll get it, and you’ll be able to do it. It blows away two of our favorite tool criteria, effectiveness and efficiency. It works; that is, you’ll get notable change out of this tool. So that makes it effective. And, it’s terribly fast, without ANY fanfare or paperwork or staffing, so that makes it efficient as well. We like ANYTHING that is both effective and efficient.

The tool’s nickname is “The Hot Wash”. Its more formal name is Running an After Action Session.

Before we get into it, a note about nomenclature. We’re going to call this tool the Hot Wash, and here’s why. First, it’s catchy. It has some emotional power that “Running An After Action Session” just doesn’t. Hot Wash sounds cool, folks, and we’re all about cool here. Okay, we’re not really all about cool, but the point is, names matter. One on ones as a title works because people long to connect on a personal level, one to one. We’re looking for a better name for the feedback model, in fact, just for this reason. We used to like the IMPERSONALITY of it, frankly, but we’re re-thinking that. Hot Wash will excite your people a bit.

What’s more, it will reinforce that the tool you’re using will be relatively painless, short and sweet. No graphs, no charts, no dog and pony. “We’re gonna meet, talk about how things went, and see what to keep and what to make better next time. Nothing fancy. Hot Wash.”

As well, After Action processes can be a LOT more complicated. We’ll do a show at some point about a really in depth effort that will impress the heck out of you, and we may ask some professional colleagues to be involved. Basically, we’re stealing a core part of the larger and revered After Action Process. We know most of you won’t ever use the larger process… but that doesn’t mean you can’t get a ton out of a Hot Wash. A Ton!

One final point about the name. I haven’t been able to verify this. I believe the reason it’s called Hot Wash comes from the Army. I think it’s because a quick way to clean a rifle or other small weapon is to douse it in boiling hot water. It’s not a complete cleaning — a soldier still has to break down the weapon and get into the details. But it serves a valuable, immediate purpose by getting at the big stuff in a split second.

And how many other things do you do at work that get at the big stuff in a split second (besides some of the rest of Manager Tools?) One more thing: You’re gonna love it.

We also promised during the show that we’d share a sample email you can use to invite folks to your first Hot Wash. As promised, here it is …

Sample Email “Say It” Text

Team Member:

Manager.

This week’s show (part 1 of 2 parts) is about a rarely used but powerful Manager Tool, The Skip Level.

If you’ve ever wondered what was going at senior levels, and thought that if “they” would keep you informed, things would be a whole lot better, the Skip Level is YOUR way of reducing those problems in your part of your organization. The fact is, it’s hard to communicate even directly to your team. Many of us learned that when we “discover” our teams through One on Ones.

Skip Levels help managers communicate more directly and deeply into their organization. It can never take the place direct communications among teams and individuals, but it is a powerful adjunct to those efforts.

We lay it all out for you: their purpose, the basics of setting one or more up, what the agenda should be, what to cover and how, and, what the most important item on the agenda always is.

Other managers not welcome - that’s the Skip Level.

For this week’s show, we conclude our conversation on Skip Levels. Have you scheduled YOUR first Skip Level yet?

We’ve received several questions by email and on the website regarding how to handle input about your team from other people in your organization. This cast, on what to do with “feedback” from others, seems perfectly timed. We knew we’d get questions like these - they’re pretty normal. But we sure didn’t expect to have this good of timing!

While there will always be those who share information with you that isn’t necessarily intended to truly help your organization, we believe the vast majority is well intended. And yet, so often it is delivered clumsily, and/or is unactionable. This cast will help you RECEIVE it well, and then help you action it.

You can’t expect others to give you readily packaged feedback, but you don’t dare just pass on what they say. How do you do that?

Have a listen.

One of the lost arts of the corporate world in the past 20 years is how to work with an administrative assistant. While we won’t argue that a great deal of the “leaning out” of corporations has been a good thing, working with admins effectively is one of the painful legacies of the cutbacks.

Of the executives who are assigned admins, our experience is that very few know how to use them well. There are many ways that the fantastic opportunity an admin offers are squandered. But in virtually all cases, the fundamental failure of managers who execute this responsibility is that they fail to delegate enough to the admin.

We start a series of casts on administrative assistants this week. In our first installment, we discuss the basics principles that will guide your thinking.

These casts will either help you do things right when you get to the point where you’re assigned an admin. Or, if you have an admin now, these casts will help you re-invent the relationship, making it what you always thought it should be.

After you’ve listened, you’ll want your admin to hear it.

This week, we continue our series on working effectively with administrative assistants. Given that this is part 2 of 3 parts, we’ve obviously had a lot to discuss on the subject.