Time leaks.  Think about it as the process of putting in time on something you
get little or nothing back in return for.  Whoops, that’s too conceptual.

Try thinking of it in the following two ways:
1. It’s anything you do, that you have to do over, or do extra follow-up
because the first time you did it or requested it, wasn’t sufficient.

2. Time leaks are also the time it takes to re-orient.  You know, you’re focused
on a task and then someone walks in, or calls you, and after dealing with that
issue, you find yourself thinking,”Now where was I?” because you’ve lost the
flow and you now need to refocus and gear up again.

Actually, if you stop, you would probably come up with a whole list of time
leaks.  Here’s a couple that have already hit my schedule today.

- Meetings that started late and ended later.
- Having to repeat a request for the upteenth time to a direct report.
- Following up on a request because I didn’t hear or see what the status
was after handing it off.
- Having to rework an issue because someone else didn’t finish what they promised.

I bet you could easily add to the list.  In fact once you take a quick review
of your own personal time leak list, let me ask you this question:
“Do you notice any themes from your time leaks?”

I do, I bet you do as well.  Here’s the top 5 that pop to mind.

1.  Time leaks cost money.  But it’s not immediately visible money.  You
don’t actually see either time or money leaking away, but they are.

2. Time leaks are often laced with frustration. They are mini-aggravations
through the day, not joyful moments.

3. Time leaks, especially recurring ones, exist because I’m avoiding
taking some next step, often a confrontation, which will then need to
be followed by a consequence.  Time leaks are a more comfortable
choice for non-confrontation, and/or not moving to next, instead of
addressing the leak and getting it plugged on a personal process level.

4. Time leaks just seem to be a regular part of getting work done through
people.  Maybe God assigned time leaks to Adam and Eve, as part of the
reconstruction of life as having pain and frustration post garden.

5. Time leaks accompany the “easy” choice when it comes to coordinating
with others.  It’s easy to:
- pick up the phone,
- make a request in a meeting,
- send an IM,
- send an email…

None of those easy forms of requests and hand-offs generate equally
easy follow-up, hence you get back into wasting time or leaking time
following up, repeating, re-inquiring, stepping in, etc…

Funny how documenting and then reviewing what’s been posted, although,
it takes time initially, saves me a lot of time leaks after the fact.  That’s
probably why I like ManagePro so much.

Each day, I’m hitting multiple targets, yesterday it ranged from the US to
India, from Alaska to Florida, from staff, to customers, to vendors, all
around the world and I’m easily frustrated by time leaks, so it pays for me
to spend the time documenting in ManagePro and having it be the central
place I can manage all the moving parts from… because it plugs a lot of
time leaks for me.
Summary:
Time leaks.  We easily slip into accepting them as part of our regular
work life, in a way that we would never accepts leaks in other areas.
5 major themes characterize time links ranging from time is money,
albeit not immediately visible money… to time leaks are linked to the
“easy” choice when it comes to getting work done through others.
ManagePro is my personal solution for plugging the links, that and being
actively assertive and living beyond my comfort zone to address
issues, not slide by with one more follow-up or meeting.

Her world view starts to look like it’s guarded by the Great Wall of China.
And then I thought, boy that can be uncomfortably  true of us
at work.   See if this makes sense to you.

You see with Alzheimer’s, you don’t update your world view. 
Since you can’t remember stuff so well, recent events don’t have much lasting
effect on the world you carry around in your head.  And secondly, you tend to
discard feedback that your skills are degrading, and instead of integrating
the new data (because your brain isn’t working so well at integrating), you
get frustrated, and you get mad at others for not treating you consistent
with your “non-updated” world view of your self. 

Got that?  OK, you probably already know where this is going, but think
about what helps us keep an updated, reality based world view at work?

If you thought about listening, you’re heading down my path.
McKinsey Quarterly just published a guide to better listening as an effective
tool to improved decision making.  The Executive’s Guide to Better Listening.
It’s a good quick read, essentially concluding that listening is an under-
developed skill, and that listening skills help us make better decisions and
have longer, more successful careers.

Here’s what I wanted you not to miss.  Listening is one essential tool for
updating your views at work.  The key being, you and I need to keep our
“world view at work” open to reality corrections and updates.

Open to input can be as personal as recalibrating how valuable what you
believe you bring to the table is,  as defined by your team’s perceptions.

Open to input can be as singular as hearing what really is the biggest
value proposition your customers feel they are getting from you… and what
the biggest annoyances they have to put up with to do business with you.

By-the-way, what’s the sound of someone listening and then responding
with a closed world view?  You hear it all the time at work.  It’s the sound
of the person defending. 

The McKinsey article got close to that point when they described executives
as people who can ignore listening as a means of getting information, and
“focus instead on articulating their own views more effectively.” 

The writer offers this gentle poke in the ribs, “That approach may work
perfectly well if you already know everything.  For those who don’t …”
he suggests reading the article and getting better at listening.

More accurately –  it’s really about  listening for what purpose, isn’t it?

The funny thing about us as humans, is that we naturally seek out and listen 
to information that confirms our world view.  In fact when we really hang on
tight to definitions about:
- our personal value at work; what our product or service delivers;
- why customers should value us in return,
- how much money we should make, etc. it can be really difficult to listen in
a way that actively collects, probes, challenges and seeks to understand new
information.  New information that is so vital to keeping our world view
up-to-date, relative and accurate.

Making sure you are listening to what’s real and doing something about it,
is probably a good way to paraphrase Bossidy and Charan’s book,
“Confronting Reality; Doing what matters to get things right.”

Bottom Line:
So here’s my note to myself - “Don’t practice having Alzheimers at work.” 
Keep reverifying reality, and the validity of your view about personal and
product values, your views about customers, the market, what works and
what doesn’t.  Listen, and as Bossidy and Charan suggest, do what
matters to create better alignment and reduce the disconnect
of defending. Defending is such a waste in life, isn’t it?

Most people at work have a few favorite complaints about meetings.  You
probably have your list and have heard these from others as well:
- They take too long, not a clear agenda, no one cuts long-winded X off
- Meetings take up to big a part of their day, makes it hard to get things
  done
- People go to meetings to have status, something on the schedule, not 
  because they necessarily create value

But at the end of the day, most of us don’t get serious about changing meetings.

Why?  Well its funny, but meetings have been around since all the way back
to Garden - remember that interesting one with God, Adam, Eve and the fig
leaves. Meetings, despite all the problems, meet some important status,
social, comfort and communication needs.  They grease the political wheels
in every corporation I’ve worked with.

Meetings aren’t going away anytime soon.  Even if they are outdated in the
21st century as a way to communicate information, analyze data and make decisions.

So here’s what I thought this week, as I heard one more person talk about
how little people get done at their company… because everyone is attending
meetings all day long.  I think they described their organization as having
a “meeting culture.”

I thought, “What if you don’t improve meetings?”  What if you just leave
them be?  Meetings were around long before I started working, and they will
be here long after I quit working.  If you Google it, the estimates are that
between 11 million and 25 million meetings occur every day in the US alone.

Then I started thinking, what if  you wanted to create this dynamic
interchange between people at work?  What if it had to run at the pace
that everything else is happening?  What if it had to allow people to merge
seamlessly in a conversation,  not have one person at a time consume
large amounts of time?

What if we needed a different image, a different story to approach this type
of interaction.   What if we called them, saw them, operated in them as…
drum roll…. “Roundabouts!”

What if people participated in Roundabout interactions like they do when
driving their car?  I mean no one parks their car in a roundabout, nor do
they endlessly go in circles.  The key is to merge into a fast moving paced
sequence and exit when you don’t need to be there any longer.

What if roundabouts only occur when you need to get people coming from
different vantage points, circling the topic and then redirected in the new
direction?  What if roundabouts couldn’t occur without a convergence,
a decision to be made?  What if Roundabouts were solely focused on
coordinating effort, and getting the input and updates from multiple
people to allow you to make the best decision, and it all had to keep moving.

What if you didn’t sit in a roundabout?  What if you stood up in these
interactions?  What if you had sort of portable lecterns that people
grabbed so they could stand and still work with their notes, type on
their laptop, write on their notepad?

I told my wife that I wanted to go into the business of building portable
Roundabout stands that would fold up in the corner, but then stand up
like music stands, but flat at the top.  She suggested I not got into
manufacturing just yet.  She’s good at discerning enthusiasm and
business demand.  She didn’t write the eBooks on meetings, I did

Bottom Line:

What if we created new rules:
1. Go to meetings to be seen, be heard, be supportive, stay current and
101 other reasons, but if you want to get things done…
2. Go to a Roundabout.  My term, for  a new interaction structure that
supports multiple people rapidly addressing a series of issues, and then
taking off, with the key being concise, short, interactions, spaced exchanges
and clear exits. 

Tell me what you think.

Well, you’ll be a long way forward in this turbulent world if you consider
strategy to be hopelessly riddled with assume.  It’s like they are bed partners,
and you can act like it isn’t true, but every strategy is built on assumptions.

What should you do? 

Some people give up on strategy, just keep doing whatever works, or whatever
their hunch or proclivity is, and hope the “river doesn’t rise” until they make
enough money to get out of the  game.

What should you do?

Yea, what should you do, especially if you would like to be strategic, and not
just do what worked last year, or chase after the opportunity of the moment?

The McKinsey Quarterly produced an article entitled Just-in-Time Strategy
for a Turbulent World, which suggests you can’t know the future, so the best
strategy is to hedge your bets with a portfolio of strategic goals. 

Hedging your bets makes sense anytime you are betting on assumptions, but
when I read this,  I know what most corporate leaders do with this message.
That’s right, they assume, they’ve got the risk managed with multiple options.

So let me be clearer about what dealing realistically with the reality of assumptions
being in bed with your strategy.  It’s all about the need to check.  The article
in McKinsey describes it with the phrase, “Rigorous monitoring is crucial”, but
I don’t think that gets to an emotional level that connects.  So let me frame
it a different way.

Imagine if you are a guy, and you’re wearing pants that have a zipper that
has been previously known to slip, in fact it has already slipped once today
and someone snickered.  Would you check?  Of course you would.
Regularly.

Or if you are a woman and you’re wearing a low cut top, do you check to see
that everything is in place and not slipped?  You bet.

So we are used to handling some risks by checking regularly, especially if there’s 
a risk of personal embarrassment.

Transfer that same feeling, that same sense of possible embarrassment and sense
of exposure, to your strategy and suddenly you have a whole new perspective
on what it means to have a strategic plan.  It’s something you need to check
on repeatedly and respond if something has slipped!

That’s the correct perspective to have when it comes to strategy.   That’s
my translation of McKinsey’s statment, “The hallmark of this approach
is the willingness to change direction continually as more and more distinct
knowledge appears.”

BTW, the McKinsey article has a few suggestions worth reviewing, but for a
specific “do these four steps” grab my simple ebook on how to create and
manage a strategic plan.  You can get it here -http://rodneybrim.com/info/ebooks 
and find out why the 4 key components are 1. Relevance, 2. Actionated,
3. Reviewed via Metrics and 4. the Right technology to link strategy to
the front lines.

Bottom Line:
A strategy is at best a set of assumptions about an uncertain future.  Reduce
your risk of having the wrong strategy by diversifying, and by repeatedly
checking with the willingess to shut down and start anew, when the results
aren’t there.  For most of us the biggest change is to form the habit of checking,
and then checking again.  Just think about zippers and you’ll get better at
checking in 2012.

Links:
Reviving Your Strategic Plan
Strategic Planning Leadership

An article in 2008 on “Why You Need Quiet Time“  covered some of
the health benefits, including strengthening parts of the brains
that would normally decline with aging.  Yes I need that, being a boomer.

But the thought I wanted you to chew on was Rikki Fowler’s
statement in the article, “”Silence allows the creative process.
It’s giving the right mind space, so it can say its piece.”

What if this year you need to be more creative than you ever
have been before?  What if business as usual is not in your best interest?
What if creativity is your CRITICAL SUCCESS factor this year? 
Would you properly resource it, make sure it was emphasized?

What if a lot of the old rules, especially financial ones, don’t work so
well?  Maybe your job is uncertain, your house, previously heralded
as the investment that you couldn’t go wrong with, is now under water?
The future looks uncertain.

What if it isn’t new year business as usual this January.  You know set
new goals, dust off the strategic plan, get down to business and crank…

What if more then ever, it was critical to take some time
and stop
and be Quiet,
because it’s time to pay attention and be creative. 

Maybe we all share a lot in common with Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz,
and we’re realizing more than ever that “Toto, I don’t think we’re in
Kansas anymore.”  Life isn’t looking as familiar as usual.

A recent article my friend Greg Vilkin sent me, The Joy of Quiet,
does a great job of reminding us that in one generation we have
gone from gaining greater and greater access to information,
instant access, to overwhelm and the need to unplug.

One casualty of being plugged in all the time, is that we lose
time to be quiet, which is a prerequisite for being plugged into
ourself.  The quote from Michael maller, from a half century ago, is
even more valid today, as he warned, “When things come at you very
fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.”

So beyond the health of your brain and other organs, maybe there’s
a lot of good reasons to make sure you get some quiet time regularly
as this new year kicks off.  Here’s a couple of recommendations to consider:

Recommendations:

1. Take some time to be quiet and listen to yourself.  We all need listening
     to be able to connect, including connecting with our self.
2. Listen to the conversation going on in your head. 
    Listen to the rules you’ve made up for your self about life.
    Listen to the promises you’ve made to your self.  
    It all needs some attending, and quite possible creative new approaches 
    and options.
3. Finally, if you’re like me, put the quiet time on your calendar, otherwise
    it gets nudged out by all the sound and commotion around.  If you don’t
    block it out… it won’t happen.

Have a creative, blessed, tremendous year in 2012 and guard your
quiet time, there’s treasures in that space.

For those of you who don’t have the time to load and watch the video,
Utta starts by underscoring using familiar SMART goal criteria for
getting in shape and accomplishing other goals.

She references the need for goals to be believeable, broken down into
concrete, acheivable, sub goals or milestones, and tied to specific
measurement points, e.g. translate “I’m going to get in shape” to “I’m
going to lose 10 pounds in 10 weeks.” 

All probably stuff you are familiar with, but here’s the sleeper.

When she talks about running she lights up, she’s talking about something
she enjoys and she let’s all of us in on a little, well big, secret. 
FIND A WAY TO MAKE IT FUN.

What if that’s the key to every change moving forward.  Maybe the
word fun is to limiting, but we all need to find a way to make it pay-off,
to make it rewarding… but get this… along the way, not just at the end. 

Ah, so if you set out to accomplish something, and you don’t find a
way to make it anything but a grueling endurance process, your
likelihood of seeing it through to the end drops like a rock. 

Got it.  

Hey let me extend that concept just a bit more for you, especially as
it relates to the world of work.

I am convinced that for people to be high performers at work they
consistently need 4 things, just like every high performance athlete.
Watch what’s 4th on the list, it may surprise you.

1. We all need a game plan, what’s next, what works, what’s critical
2. We all need a scoreboard, some way to tell if we are getting ahead
     or falling behind
3. We all need a game clock, some way to tell how much time we have
     left to work with.

and then there’s number 4.

4. We all need recognition.   We’ll all need a pay-off.  You do, I do,
and that can include a number of things, but funny enough getting
recognized by someone you trust and value, often stays with us the
longest.

Bottom Line:
To achieve goals there are a pretty consistent set of criteria that work, called
SMART.  To play at a high level in the world of work, we need a similar
framework, including a game plan, a game scoreboard and a game clock…
but just as much as anything else we need a pay-off that ultimately hinges
on recognition.  Are you getting enough recognition?  Do you take
advantage of giving it to others and in so doing supporting them playing
at a high level?  Let me know.

Links:
Working Strategically and the 3 Legged Stool of Outcome, Game Clock & Value
Most of What You Have Read about Smart Goals is Wrong

Well first let me tell you what was the 3rd most frequently cited pain:
#3 – Overwhelmed by incoming email and trying to use it to manage
people, but still not able to get updates in a timely manner.  Sound familiar?

And #2 – Linking work effort to a plan, particularly a strategic plan.
“ Once strategic goals are set or projects launched, it is difficult to identify
and track what the action plan is and how it is progressing.  And if it isn’t
progressing well, to have the data available to determine what the
course correction should be.”

Have we covered what you thought was going to be #1 yet?  Here it is,
the #1 most commonly reported pain in managing people, is

“Getting people to spend a bigger % of their time generating
revenue, getting done what’s important.”

So why do we get so little productive time out of employees? 
Here’s some thoughts about the reasons why:

1. Being too responsive to email.  Yes I said, “too responsive”. 
Whether that’s checking frequently, or worse, getting notified as
soon as you have new email… it all creates a gigantic interruption
to staying focused on getting done what’s important.  Check out
this bit of statistics.  Bottom line, if you check email hourly or 8
times a day, you’re losing 2 hours of productivity…
after you finish the email.  Yikes.

In 2007, a group of Microsoft workers took, on average,
15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks, such as
writing reports or computer code, after dealing with incoming
email. They wandered off to reply to other messages or browse
the Web.  New York Times, 3/25/2007

2.  70% of us are working harder, but on what?  The Houston
Business Journal, 2/27/2006 reported that “In general, a third
of all American workers could be viewed as chronically
overworked.” Check out these two data points:

Are you too overworked to focus on your job?
Yes, 62.8%; Sometimes, 23%; No, 14.2%.  
Boston.com Internet poll, Spring 2005

71% of white-collar workers feel stressed about the amount
of information they must process and act on while doing business;
60% feel overwhelmed.   Institute of the Future, Menlo Park, CA

It looks like we are working harder and longer, but not at
what generates revenue, but at managing information and our
access to others, with all the interruption that creates in our
work flow.  We’re overworked… but get this, not focused on
our job.  So what are most people focused on, if not their job?
Fill in the blank, but I bet if you look it will be off managing the
next crisis, the next email, the next request, attending the next
meeting… you get the point.

It’s very apparent that working on what generates revenue is no
match in competing for out attention with the incoming email, IMs,
text messaging and meeting time on our schedule.  Time to spend
on priorities, on what moves the business concretely forward, just
loses over and over when it comes to a battle for our time and attention.

Guess what?… I going to get to a suggestion about how you can
change the game.

Part of the reason that time generating revenue gets de-prioritized,
is that most of us on any given day, don’t have a set of “move the
business forward” priorities. 

Guess what else?  Most people don’t naturally create that set of
priorities for themselves.  If you manage people, you have to.

Well actually you don’t have to, and you may in fact have all sorts
of reasons why “you shouldn’t have to,” but in fact if you want to
change the game, if you want to have your direct reports spend
more time on what will generate revenue, you have to make the
priorities really explicit.

You not only have to make priorities really clear, each day,
 you have to have a system for them to easily respond to the
priorities… so that you can easily check to see if they got done. 
(Yes you have to check, to follow-up, otherwise the request or
deliverable loses intensity as a priority.)

Are you yelling, “No, it can’t be!” yet?  Most managers I know
don’t want to spend even a few minutes a day setting priorities
with their direct reports.

Bottom Line:
If you are in a management position, if you have to get work done
through others, than you’ll probably resonate with what we found
to be the biggest pain in the process, and that’s getting people to
spend a bigger % of their day on what generates revenue. 

In order to change the game, to get a bigger % of time spent on
what’s important, you have to reduce access to information
process (emails, IM, time spent in meetings), and increase the
vividness of today’s priorities… for each person you manage.
BTW, there is no better program that I have found to manage
people, than ManagePro.    The ability to see the whole field,
all the projects, but then in one click to see what the person
walking through the door is responsible for and what they’ve
accomplished to date (including what they have done on
what you assigned them)… is priceless.

Well, actually here’s the 15 second sound byte first.
      On the road to improvement, 
      we encounter what we are adverse to address,  
      yet it turns out that addressing what we wish to avoid
      … is key to improvement.

So here’s how it started. Well at least most recently.  First I get
Patrick Lencioni (author of books like the Death of Meetings,
and 5 Dysfunctions of Team), latest blog talking about “sins of
omission” in the organization.  Here’s a brief quote:

“See, in most organizations, the biggest problems arise not because
leaders are actively promoting the wrong behavior, but rather
because they’re passively doing so by allowing people to get away
with this behavior without impunity.

The most common reason that leaders commit sins of omission is
simply because they just don’t feel comfortable confronting people
about what they are or are not doing. Instead, they look the other
way and hope that the problem goes away… This is a moment of
great humility. And a moment of truth.”

OK, first gut check.  Are you, like most people, adverse to giving
feedback, does it make you uncomfortable, do you avoid it?
… do you get the “clutchy feeling” and look for a hole in the floor?
… especially if the person is likely to get defensive?

I think the answer is, the world over… ABSOLUTELY. 
What was your answer? _____________

So then I get another email from a CEO who said that he got
too busy to deploy ManagePro, where ManagePro represented
his intention to get his organization to improve, progress, and be
better at delivering accountable results.

What was quite obvious, is that being busy, was correct, but only
partially so.  What was really happening was that along the
road to his best intentions, some members of his management
team resisted, even defied his intent to improve things, and he
stopped the process, in this case deploying ManagePro, so that
he wouldn’t have to confront members of his team.

OK, second gut check.  Do  you, like this CEO, stop short of
improving things if it means you have to confront people
on dysfunctional behavior at work?

Again, I think the answer is, the world over… ABSOLUTELY.
What was your answer?_____

Yes confronting stuff that doesn’t work is not fun.  It makes a
majority of people turn the other way… or tip toe out of the room.
However it is a necessary part, right along with affirming what is
working, to succeeding on the path to improvement.

What’s obvious in our business is people buy ManagePro explicitly with the
intent of using it to improve their organization.  You know, hopefully get
rid of or around the effects of those behaviors we are adverse to address. 
Instead, deploying ManagePro seems to make those dysfunctional attitudes
and behaviors all the more obvious, as you create a transparent platform,
for documenting plans, follow through and results.  Oh boy.  Now what are
you going to do?

Bottom Line:
So here’s what I would like you to consider.  On behalf of the survi-
vability of your own aspirations, on behalf of the healthiness of the
organization you invest your life working at, on behalf of just a
healthier world… steel your nerves, uncurl your toes, keep breathing
and start to tell a little more truth about what works and doesn’t at
work.  We’ll all enjoy work more if we do.

I’m guessing what you are thinking, and actually you just missed it.  What? 
Go back, before the meeting and let me show  you something I’ve learned.

Have  you noticed how that saying things concisely is not a skill or
talent liberally given to all?  OK, that registers, right?

How about this one.  Have you noticed the number of people that feel
the need to say a point two or three times before finishing? 

What’s with that?  I’ll explain in second, but the point I wanted to make is
very few people efficiently present, discuss and conclude in a concise manner. 

OK, so people aren’t concise.  But that’s only part of it.  But let’s just guess
for a moment.  Does that mean most people take let’s say 3x to make
presentation or a point in a meeting, as it should take if they were concise?
You got it.  Did you notice the 3x?  That’s a big difference, but there’s more.

Let’s say someone is relatively concise and they get through what they want
to say in one pass.  Let’s say they talk for 5 minutes to present their point. 
That would be roughly 1 to 1.5 pages of information if they were to write it out.
Do you know how long it takes you to read  a page to a page and a half?  It
takes approximately 1 minute. 

So let’s add this up.  By being verbally tangential and/or repetitive, most people
use 3 times the amount of meeting time that should be required to present
a point.  And, get this – if they were to write it out, it would actually take 1/5
the time to read as they are requiring time on the meeting floor.

Those are big numbers.  1/3 the time.  1/5 the time.  What if those were
additive?  Let see if it normally requires me 10 minutes to talk through
a point, then if I was really concise I might get that to 3 minutes, but
actually if I printed it out, it would only require the other participants
a minute or less to come up to speed.  From 10 minutes to 1 minute.

So what’s the catch?   Why doesn’t everyone submit their topic, the facts,
what they want, etc. in writing? 

Big drum roll…………  How would you fill that in?  Remember this could
mean you will get through that meeting at 4pm or much sooner.  So don’t
dodge.

The answer, like most things in the world, is that nothing is free, especially
higher performance and in the case of meetings it means that people
have to spend more time preparing for the meeting, instead of showing up
and winging it, joining the discussion… oh boy here we go again.

Ok, so tip 13b is succintly this… -  Have people present their topic
in a written form and save the dialogue for Q&A, discussion and final decisions.

But wait a moment, doesn’t that mean everyone who presents will have
to spend more time getting ready for a meeting?  Yes it does.  And let’s
look at the math on that one as well.  If it takes you an hour to write up
your presentation, which moves your presentation from the 10 minute
meeting spot mentioned above to a 1 minute read and let’s say there are
10 people in the meeting. 

If I’m that presenter it took one hour out of my schedule, but I saved
the group of 10, 9 minutes.  So I traded 60 minutes of preparation for an
90 minutes of savings in the meeting.  I’m still up, even though the
number’s don’t as overwhelmingly attractive.  Actually John Tropman,
in his book, Making Meetings Work, reports the average is more like two
to one.  Two hours of savings for every one hour spent in meeting preparation. 

There’s a host of other benefits from having the initial presentation for each
agenda topic written out.  Better focus, better outcomes, better meeting
process… I could go on, buy you are probably already ahead of me.

Oh, and that point about why do people say things 2 – 3 times.  It actually
has a number of roots.  Sometimes it’s a:
- Comfort thing, they keep reworking the material until they feel comfortable
they not left anything out… that you understand,
- Control thing, I’m going to hold the floor awhile, I kinda like it,
- Waiting for the brain to catch up, repeating is a way to allow the brain to
catch up and figure out what we’re going to say next or be asked next.
There are a lot more possibilities, but that’s three I commonly see.

Bottom Line:
One especially effective way to reduce the time spent in your next meetings
is to require participants to submit the presentation (on the screen via a
projector or printed, either is fine) in a written instead of verbal form.

Links:
Take a look at the ebooks and video’s I have on Creating Meetings that
Take Half the Time and are Twice as Effective at my new site
http://www.RodneyBrim.com

When it comes to meetings we read/think Agenda, and only assume
the Outcome.  Actually it turns out that there’s a lot of diverse definitions
floating around amongst participants in most meetings when it comes to
defining Outcome.

It’s one of the reasons the average meeting  is so much less than it could
be.  That’s right, not having a defined, shared outcome, is one
of the reasons most meetings aren’t very efficient, and why I’m
able to teach people  how to lead meetings that take half the time pretty
easily.  Stay with me and I’ll explain how that ties into Outcome and one
thing you can do to turn around the very next meeting you are leading…
for the better.

First the rap on meetings.  Most meetings consume a minimum of twice
the time resources necessary to process the information being discussed. 
During that extra 50% of the time used, most people feel a sense of boredom,
tedium or frustration… certainly not entertainment – hence the tendency
to multi-task during meetings. 

Additionally meetings also don’t generate effective long term output, so
they and the information in them, has to be recycled, repeated multiple
times.  If meetings were compared to any other resource, they would be
rated as being incredibly time consuming, and costly, for the value
generated.  Typically the amount of time lost in a single meeting is the
equivalent of a whole day’s productivity for a member of the team. Ouch!

OK, so what does that have to do with Outcome and why draw the
distinction between agenda and outcome?  Let me share with you my
top 3 functions that Outcome plays in a meeting. 

1. Without a Defined Outcome, the meeting doesn’t have a reference to
determine value.  Where do you, where does the group, expect to get, and
what tangibles do they expect to have by the end of the meeting? 
Meetings suffer when they don’t have a responsibility to reach an outcome.

2. A Defined Outcome is not only the destination; it is a course
correcting reference process throughout the meeting.  It’s the
first decision point for whom to include in a meeting.   It should be the
hidden value-add question in your mind for every conversation…
e.g. “Is this discussion going to help us get to our defined outcome?” 
It is the guide that helps you make effective trade-offs  on how to spend
time throughout the meeting.

3. The Defined Outcome is the basis for creating an Agenda, as
the Agenda essentially represents the topics that need to be addressed
to reach your intended Outcome.  Think of your agenda as simply the
work plan to reach the Outcome.  Defining the Outcome is essential for
defining Who is going to attend; What’s going to be addressed; and
When you make course corrections in each and every meeting.

Bottom Line: Establishing a defined and shared outcome across the
participants for every meeting is a critical starting point and alignment
guide for every business meeting you lead.  And it is lacking as
an active, in your face, resource for a majority of business meetings.
Don’t let it be in yours.

Here’s two tips:
1. Go watch a free 10 minute video I’ve put on on using Outcomes
in Meetings you can get access to it by signing up on this page
http://rodneybrim.com/info/video

2.  Go read an ebook on the topic and other keys to creating
great meetings that I’ve made available for free at
http://rodneybrim.com/info/ebooks