Meetings. Some are good, some are bad and some are just a waste of time.
It doesn’t matter if these meetings take place in a corporate boardroom, during a civic club leadership session, with a church committee, whatever, we’ve all sat through some version of the good, the bad and the wasteful.
One of the main reasons people find some meetings tedious and not worth their while is because they don’t think the topic being discussed is relevant to what they do. Imagine this: You’re sitting in a leadership meeting with all disciplines of your company represented—production, sales, HR, IT, accounting, safety, quality, etc. The president and the production manager are having a difficult conversation. The president is pressing the manager to solve the recent production issues, the production manager doesn’t seem to have the right answers and tension in the room is growing.
While the production manager and president argue, several of the other managers are totally detached. One manager is checking email on a smart phone; another manager is doodling, while yet another manager just looks zoned out.
You can tell that the team believes the production issue is strictly between the president and the production manager. No one else feels obligated to join in the discussion. They are waiting until the focus turns to their own area of responsibility, when it will be their time “in the box” with the president.
The older I get and the more I see, the more I believe issues and opportunities within a company are interconnected. Ultimate responsibility for a certain area of the business, with its specific problems and promises, lies with everyone—not just the person who is over that particular area. For instance, using the example above, the sales manager could have some good ideas about helping solve the production issues. His salespeople are directly interacting with the customers, and the customers surely are giving them feedback. That information could be valuable to the production team. So the sales manager shouldn’t just excuse himself from the production issue because it’s not his “direct area.” Sales has a unique perspective about production. And often, not being so close to the problem allows for clarity regarding what might be going on.
This sense of shared responsibility is the difference between a healthy culture and an unhealthy culture. How healthy is your company’s culture? How helpful are your team members to each other?
It’s called a leadership “team” for a reason. We win together. We feel the pain of loss together. A problem in production is a problem faced by everyone in the company. It should be addressed by all.
For more on building a healthy work culture, check out The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business by Patrick Lencioni. (He’s also the author of the bestselling books The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Death by Meeting and The Ideal Team Player.)
In The Advantage, Lencioni argues that the seminal difference between successful companies and mediocre ones has little to do with what innovations they employ or how smart they are and more to do with how healthy they are. He believes an organization is healthy when it is whole, consistent and complete, when its management, operations and culture are unified. Healthy organizations outperform their counterparts, are free of politics and confusion and provide an environment where star performers never want to leave.
Healthy organizations function as a team with everyone “all in.” I think this is an idea whose time has come.
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