BLUF: My boss wants me to start running a staff/team meeting and invite some of my top customers. Make sense to mix the two or should they be separate meetings?
Background:
I am an individual contributor in engineering in a transportation company.
A recent re-org has given me more responsibilities. My boss has asked me to be a team lead and direct the work of 3 of my coworkers. (Org chart technically remains flat where my boss has 12 directs and we all functionally report to my boss).
My boss suggested I have start running weekly staff meetings with these 3 other folks. And he suggested it would be a good idea to invite some of my top customers. His idea is that customers can attend as needed and this will give them a forum to communicate with my team and etc.
Some questions:
1. I had not thought or heard of the staff meeting / customer combination. Any potential pitfalls here? I like the idea of more communication but not sure how the "Customer Around the Room" agenda item would work.
2. I am more senior to the other team members and will be expected to report on their performance. But they are not techically my directs so is this a "staff meeting" or a "team meeting"?
3. Should I still follow the guidance in the staff meeting cast with flowdown then individual team member updates? Peer one-on-ones?
Thanks in advance for your thoughts.
JLM
Clients at staff meetings
I work for an engineering company and we have project staff meetings with the cliente regularly, weekly. They are really good for enhancing comunications with the client and also to show and solve simple issues as the technical team is at the meeting. it also gives the team members an opportunity to understand clients needs and concerns first hand. What i do not like though is when there is at the meeting Internal staff disagreement on an issue That should have been solved internally prior to the meeting. It is ok to have an internally discusión on a non pending ítem, but when people are surprised at the meeting by a pending issue or gives a different opinion on an issue already closed it shows poor coordination of tasks within the team. My recommendation is for you to have one on ones or peer on one ones and work meetings on specific issues which solution need to be presented at the meeting and you should be fine. If you do not have an oficial hierarchical structure over the people whose work you are now responsible for, having the client at the meeting can help you in tío ways: 1) for the team members to be impressed by the clients support, dependency and trust on your work (i am assuming That is the case or your boss would not recomend them be there), and 2) for people to be holding accountable for work to be then directly with the client (people know no client no job). They may be peers to you in the oficial organización but if you are responsable for their work it is one on one not peer one on one. Are you or your boss going to write their evaluations? What i am not too sure about is mixing more than one costumer at the same meeting, it seems like what may matter to one may not matter to another
Oooh. Trouble
We do so much pre-wiring before these sorts of meetings that we're really talking about two sorts of meetings:
Staff meetings/brainstorming sessions
Presentations to clients.
We walk in and, with one voice, we tell the clients what designs we've come up with, how they'd be deployed if accepted, and our suggestions for the next step(s).
As Otto von Bismark famously said: "the less clients know about how sausages and complex print-design projects are made, the better they will sleep at night."
Two meetings
In general I think 'the team' meeting with customers is a good idea. But, as AFMOFFA said, it's not your staff meeting. I'd suggest have your staff meeting for internal issues/communications and a separate meeting with the customers. Prior to the meeting with the customers any conflicts should have been resolved. It's fair enough to present a couple of different options to the customer, so long as both are real options, to elicit their opinion but disagreements need to be kept within the team. As far as the customer is concerned they're seeing a group of dedicated professionals who may explore the different ways of reaching the best solution for the customer but are fundementally in agreement.
The best thing about having a regular meeting with your customers is that when, eventually and inevitably, something goes wrong the customer knows you as people (not just a disembodied voice on the phone or, worse, an impersonal email address or 'Customer Service' line hiding behind an IVF) so is more likely to work with you and allow you time to get to a solution than to just scream down the phone at you and start talking to your competitors.
Stephen
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Skype: stephenbooth_uk | DiSC: 6137
"Start with the customer and work backwards, not with the tools and work forwards" - James Womack
Thanks
Good points and thanks all for the input.
My boss was well-intentioned by wanting to improve internal customer satisfaction. His thought was "increase communication with internal customers by providing customers a regular forum (meeting) in which they can attend and raise issues."
Thought is "if they don't show up, they can't complain we're not supporting them and making ourselves available."
But as I thought about the meeting notice I realized I was going to have ten to fifteen customers on the "optional attendee" list.
(How could this be controlled? Maybe none of them would show or maybe all fifteen would show and have issues and the meeting would be a free-for-all.)
I think it will be more effective if I have multiple smaller project meetings between my team and one or two customers at a time (Program Manager and Chief Engineer for a particular product, for example).
And I will definitely keep these separate from my team / staff meetings.
Any other thoughts? Please let me know. MT is a great resource and I would be lost without it.
JLM
Internal Customers
There's a cast around internal customers called "Jumpstarting Internal Customer Relations" that you might want to check out. Although, it appears you've been jumpstarted!
I do think you'd be best grouping customers who naturally fall together (e.g. same project, get same product/service from you), but may not work together, and meeting with them periodically. Maybe you have one meeting a week but see each customer once a month or two (depending on how many groups). An added advantage here is that you may be bringing together people who don't normally interact but have common issues. When I worked in IT, and subsequently when I moved into the Programme and Project Portfolio Management Office, I've been in the situation of bringing together people from diverse areas for meetings such as that. Whilst the fpormal purose of the meeting was for them to talk to us the greatest strength was that it gave them a forum, an excuse even, to talk to each other. Often we'd have a 90 minute meeting that was 20 minutes us talking to them about what we were doing an an hour them sharing problems and solutions and then 10 minutes us wrapping up and scheduling work to help them to implement the solutions they had shared and developed. These meetings often generated high value work for us and big savings for our internal customers.
Stephen
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Skype: stephenbooth_uk | DiSC: 6137
"Start with the customer and work backwards, not with the tools and work forwards" - James Womack
You could have a multitude
You could have a multitude of meetings that are tightly focused to prevent the "free-for-all". Here's what I'm doing with my internal customers (Your Mileage May Vary):
- staff meeting with only my staff
- 30 minute weekly check-in with each customer individually - focused on technical issues, topics specific to this customer, or specific to where they are in our relationship (i.e., what phase are they in: intake, estimating, developing, validating, launching, etc)
- 60 minute meeting each week that includes *all* customers - usually focused on process, cross-customer issues, etc
- 60 minute meeting every other week with all customers to help plan the work to be accomplished by my team over the next two week period. Having all the stakeholders in the room really helps with negotiating priorities!
- other ad-hoc meetings to get details between my staff and the customer, etc
I also attend the 15-minute morning stand-up meeting of one of my customers (they are dependent on a lot of work from my team, so it's a good conduit for me to get an early look at issues on either side).