The best leaders are great managers too. It’s a twofer.
Let the driver do his job
This morning I tested the theory of the distribution of labour.
I put myself into the hands of another service provider. Now I’m someone who provides services for a living but hey, you gotta do what you gotta do and in this case I simply couldn’t do the job myself.
I had to get to London and I hired a train driver, and his train, to take me there.
I let the driver get on with his job whilst I got on with mine. Neither disturbed the other, we both won. It’s obvious.
So the theory holds good when you can’t do the job yourself, but what about when you can?
Let’s say my daughter’s room needs tidying. (I know it’s a stretch, but just go with it). And let’s say for the moment that we’ve talked about it and she agrees it’s a good idea. Now what? We have some choices:
- We do it together
- I leave her to get on with it
- I leave her, but check in to make sure everything is ok
- I leave her to do it, check back in to see the progress, get frustrated, end up doing it myself
The fourth answer is definitely the wrong answer but it’s the one that plays out in thousands of bedrooms, boardrooms and meeting rooms every day.
Sometimes you may have to make sure the job is done the way you want it to be done and sometimes that may mean doing the job yourself. But not very often.
Learn by doing
Taking things into your own hands – whether that means doing it yourself, constantly checking in, or riding someone to make sure they do things your way – stops personal development and guarantees you’ll be elbow deep in grease every time this job comes up.
The slow way is to let them do the job themselves. It may not be perfect or done in the shortest possible time but the most effective way of learning – to drive the train, to tidy the room or to take any kind of responsibility – is by doing.
This probably means making mistakes. As long as it’s not life or death, that’s ok.
The slow way to manage is to separate the what from the how. Agree the what and let them get on with the how. They’ll develop, the organisation will develop, and you can get on with your real job.
The distribution of labour only works if you actually distribute the labour – with it we can go to the moon, without it we’d probably still be laying the concrete on the launch pad.
Effective meetings and ten ways to ruin a perfectly good one
Going to a meeting today? Rather go deep into cable and sit through seven episodes of Paint Drying Classics?
No one wants to run a bad meeting – but everybody knows that most meetings are run badly.
Learning by example, when it’s our turn, it’s difficult to ignore the years of accumulated lessons at bad-meeting-school. Here’s my top ten:
- Invite everybody who could possibly have an opinion.
- Be vague about the subject, try Sales Update or Marketing Plan or Our Strategy.
- Don’t prepare.
- Have no objective and don’t even think about an agenda.
- As soon as the start time arrives, run out to grab a coffee.
- When someone arrives late, explain everything they’ve missed in great detail.
- Don’t make decisions and under no circumstances convert anything into action points.
- Don’t recap at the end of the meetings.
- Call an end to the meeting only when half of the attendees have wondered off.
- Never send out a summary, ever.
Nobody can make you a great facilitator but here’s how to set up for success.
- No political appointees – invite only the people who matter for this meeting. It’s up to you to decide what that means but don’t invite people to stroke their ego or just because “you should”
- Give it a name – something meaningful, like Sales Challenges for Q3, or The Market’s Moved – Changes to the Marketing Plan. Meetings should be about action and bland Update-type titles set you up to inspire boredom.
- Think – sort out your objectives, agenda and speakers. What do you want from the meeting?
- Commitment – there seem to be electro-magnets dragging every meeting off track. Over time it’s possible to build a reputation for running meetings that people want to attend and that gets things done. If the purpose is clear, it’s ok to cut the flab and stay on course.
- Fire up a communiqué – spend the last few minutes of every meeting (every single one) writing a short summary of what was agreed, actions to be taken, and what should be communicated to people who weren’t there. These last few minutes are often the most productive session of all.
All the preparation in the world won’t help with hard core stragglers who turn up late and suck the life out of momentum, particularly if the most tardy are the most senior. Asking around, it seems the two most effective ways of dealing with habitual high-level offenders are, 1) telling them privately, pleasantly, but to their face, that they are affecting the performance of the team, and 2), fetching them personally five minutes before the meeting starts.
Wrestling a problem to the ground with a few close colleagues should be one the most fun things you can do in an office. Better than tv anyway.
Competition and the enemy within
It’s easy to believe that the competition is made up of other companies or people who want the same thing that you do; to land the new client, to get share of market, or wallet, or mind. It’s compelling to think that they are out to beat you.
But sometimes it’s not them, it’s you.
In The Art of War (which you can find here), sixth century B.C. military strategist Sun Tzu says,
“Know your opponent, know yourself and know the terrain: one hundred challenges without danger.”
Competition is everything that stands in the way of success.
Yep, your competitors are certainly out there, working hard to get over the line before you.
Absolutely, it’s critical to understand, plan and organise for the terrain where you operate.
Spend time looking out the window, yes, but don’t forget to look in the mirror too.
A few months ago I stood on the start line of my marathon training for Boston 2009. I’ve done plenty or marathons before so I know how to run, how to train and how to race. Two months into my program and my training came crashing down. I haven’t run since.
I was focused on the finish line, motivated to train, clear about my plan. I was disciplined.
So focused, motivated, clear and disciplined in fact that I completely forgot to know myself, to listen to my body. I pushed through the pain and limped into an overuse injury that stopped me running for the last two months. I withdrew from Boston this morning.
What attitudes are in your way? What long-held assumptions are tripping you up? What issues are you ignoring or tiptoeing around every day? What must you change, what should not be allowed to wait? Listen and do.
What’s wrong with naming your company Bland?
When Mark Twain said,
“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning”
he wasn’t talking about naming a new power generating company. But he could have been.
Naming a product of company isn’t something most (any?) of us do every day, so in some ways it helpful to know that even Twain struggled to come up with the right word. That knowledge may be power but it doesn’t make naming any easier.
People who do naming for a living find this stuff difficult too, and in reality they’re not much better at it than you or me. They may be good at checking for meaning in 72 different languages but these are the same guys who came up with Consignia (definitely worth a trip to this BBC report – Nine letters that spelled fiasco, don’t worry, I’ll wait), and Transco (for gas, now replaced by the National Grid).
Is it worth the effort anyway? After all, it’s extremely unlikely that the only thing someone knows about your business is the name. They’ll probably know a little about what you do, they’ll associate you with your category, where and how they came across you, maybe a tag line or a recommendation or two. With all that wrapped around someone’s brain, how important is the name anyway? Extremely. Seth Godin recently suggested naming everything, and came up with baxter as his own contribution.
Your name is the anchor point for all those firing neurones. A good name will stick, will stand for something and will make all of your other marketing efforts just a little bit easier. A slow factor that controls the quick.
The English language is rich – the name is out there. So how do you come up with the right word? There is no guaranteed method but here are some guidelines, so you know the right name when you see it.
So, accepting that this is going to be tough, what are the guidelines?
- Short – if you use more than three syllables everyone, including you, will shorten in anyway. International Business Machines is IBM to all of us, British Telecommunications PLC is know as British Telecom is known as BT.
- Early in the alphabet – you never know, maybe all you other marketing efforts have left a potential customer above the water line and she’s looking in a directory. Push your name above the fold with an A-to-G name. BTW – nobody likes AAAA Anything.
- Spell-able – a friend told me about flikr long before I saw the word in print, to find the site I had to ask for a link. Numbers are difficult, do you spell onetwothree or 123?
- Simple – by which I mean don’t try to be clever, try to avoid having to start sentences with “It comes from the greek for …”
- Obvious – names that capture what you do can be very strong but are difficult to pull off. Mule Bar (energy bars) is good.
Google is a great name that works on every level.
Missing the mark on any one dimension is ok, but compromise too many and your name will be weak or bland.
So what’s wrong with Bland? Tick, tick, tick, tick, ooops. Unless … maybe, just maybe, there’s an un-fashion company waiting in the wings. (I just checked, www.bland.com is a holding page – watch that space.)