Effective Meetings

In this post, I’ll share some tips I’ve found pretty useful for me and my teams as well as for some of the managers I’ve trained.

1. Meet regularly
~In my opinion, staff meetings should happen weekly, but no less than every 2 weeks…otherwise, maybe your team doesn't have enough going on.
~Consider using daily/shift huddles with all your team(s) (or the people present for the day or that shift) to cover daily information:
--who’s working
--goals for the day
--other pertinent items
--something upbeat to get everyone going and "pumped" for the day and your customers
~Huddles should be no more than 5-15 minutes in length (I recommend having them standing up around the front desk or in the break room before customers arrive). Let the more formal staff meetings cover items at a higher level than daily unless that’s needed or you don’t do huddles.

2. Have a written agenda (even if it’s up on a board)...and stick to it.

3. Take notes that list tasks with deadlines and assignments. Assign a team member to take and distribute the notes. Please ensure you follow up on deadlines and assignments or they’re less worthwhile.

4. Show respect to your people by starting and ending meetings on time (regular meetings should be able to run no longer than 1 hour...that's why you should have them more often than once a month).

5. Staff meetings should be a 2-way street. Team members should be allowed and encouraged (if not assigned) to be involved in the dialog.

6. Whenever possible, include a few minutes for team development like a book or article review or a piece of training germane to your work.

Let me leave you with this thought that one of my team members found when preparing for a training session on effective meetings:

“Meetings matter because that’s where an organization’s culture perpetuates itself. So every day, if we go to boring meetings full of boring people, then we can’t help but think that we work for a boring company. Bad meetings are a source of negative messages about our company and ourselves.” -William R. Daniels

Staff meetings? We don't need no stinking staff meetings...

How often to you talk with your folks?

Communication.

How often do you meet with your team?

Communication.

How well does your office interact?

Communication.

I guess you can tell I'm kind of hitting the "communication" topic a little hard today...ok, pretty hard.

That's because communication, whether good or poor, is the life-blood of an organization. To illustrate my point, let's take a look at a living organism. Let's take a cat (or a tiger or cougar if you need something more fierce). The cat has eyes that it can use to determine where it needs to go, where it's food is, who it likes or not. The cat has teeth to help bring nourishment into it's body or to protect itself from enemies. It has legs and paws and claws to help it run toward or away from people or things -- friends or threats. And it has a brain that does all the thinking that a cat does.

So how does a cat get the results of it's limited thinking -- whether to eat or fight or run or look around from it's brain to all the parts doing those activities? Why, it's the nervous system -- all the neurons and synapses and such. How well the nervous system operates can have great bearing on whether that cat lives or dies.

It's the same for us in business, in relationships, in life -- COMMUNICATION is like the nervous system in that cat. How well it works often has great impact on whether our relationships, our families, our businesses LIVE OR DIE.

You can tell that I am definitely biased. I believe you've got to meet with your team. I mean, how can your people know the priorities, understand what's important to you, and operate efficiently and effectively unless people are talking to each other?

It is said that most leaders think they communicate enough, yet in reality, we don't come close to spending enough time talking with our people.

A few excuses for not having regular staff meetings:

"We're too busy."
"I send them emails all the time."
"I don't call meetings just to have meetings."
"The team already knows what's important."
"They know what I'm thinking" (yikes!).

Hmmm.

Think about how well you and your team communicate and look for ways to improve.

I'll go into some detail about holding effective meetings in the next post.

Customer Service -- is it enough just to be nice?

I hear a lot of people talk about Customer Service and I've found out that a lot of people equate Customer Service as just being nice to their customers.

For sure, being nice and friendly to your customers are important and definitely a part of customer service, but that's only a small part. The problem is that you can be nice to a customer and still have the customer leave your store or company without ever getting what they want (but you're still nice).

Perhaps another way of thinking about what you provide -- instead of calling it customer service -- would be customer success.

What is Customer Success? Customer Success is helping customers do or get what they want -- to meet the goals or objectives they had when they came to your office or store or web site.

It's about VALUE. In order to have an out-of-this-world experience, customers need to KNOW that when they came to see you, they came to the right place; that your place is where they belong. Otherwise, a conversation like this can happen: "Those are really nice folks, but I'm going to shop over here instead, because these guys provide me the value I'm looking for."

This can apply anywhere from going to buy groceries to purchasing a vehicle to going to the doctor. Customers have an idea or ideas in their minds, either overtly or subconsciously, about what they want to have happen with you and your organization.

A great way to build customer loyalty and return business is to:

1. Understand what your customers value (maybe ask them?) and...
2. Help them get that value and achieve the success they're looking for.

Look at your organization and ask yourself: Are my folks just nice (and, hopefully, at least they're nice) or does our customer service continue on to customer success and value? If you don't like the answer you get...well, time for you to step up and make some changes.

Go get'em.

How Can I Make My People Trust Me?

OK, so you've been taught that -- and you believe -- to be an effective leader, in order to help your people develop and grow, to build a superb team, you've got to have a team that trusts you as their leader.

So how can you make them trust you?

YOU CAN'T!

You cannot make your people trust you.

You cannot tell them they can trust you...well, you can; but your words will ring hollow unless there's some "umphf" behind it.

What do you need to do? You can't just snap your fingers and make it happen, but there are actions you can take to move toward a "trust" relationship:

1. Let the team know what they can expect from you...and meet the expectations. In other words, do what you say you'll do.
2. Build relationships with your team members (and I don't mean being buddies). Understand what is important to your people so you can help them achieve.
3. Show your people that you have their best interests in mind (like I alluded to in #1), by your words, your expressions, your actions.

Ask yourself a question: do you have your team's best interests in mind? And if you do, do they think so? Remember, perception is reality -- yours and theirs.

I know from personal experience, unfortunately, that trust is a way easier thing to lose than it is to gain (and almost impossible to regain once lost) so make your relationship with your team a priority.

Lead by Example...because you already are

We often hear the exhortation "lead by example" and there are all sorts of web pages and books about how you can best do that.

While it's a great topic for discussion, I really don't want to go into the different ways you can lead by example. There are plenty of people who've already done that.

I'd rather step back for a second and think about what leading by example means. To me, it means that leaders are on display. These leaders can be parents, bosses, team leaders, project managers, countries (like America...since this IS the 4th of July) and those who wield influence or cause others to view them as beings to emulate.

If you're a leader, you're always on display. That means others -- bosses, colleagues and followers -- watch how you exhibit that leadership. They can see if you're having a good day or a bad one (and you know that if a boss is having a bad day, everybody's going to have a bad day). They can tell if you walk the walk -- if your actions line up with your words. They can tell what you really think is acceptable and what is not.

The adage, "lead by example" kind of makes me think that leaders have a choice of whether or not to do that or that "leading by example" is an achievement to strive for.

Unfortunately, it's not that way at all. As soon as put on the mantle of command, in whatever form that takes, you ARE leading by example and the sooner you realize it -- the sooner you embrace that constant scrutiny, the judgments make by all those around you -- the more successful leader you'll be.

We Do As We Practice

Have you ever heard that? "We do as we practice" I definitely have. I know you've heard "practice makes perfect." That's why professional organizations -- military, first responders, medical, sports teams -- if they're any good, practice their tasks until they're sometimes sick of it...and they can perform them in their sleep.

We can't reasonably expect that our team members will perform consistently and at top of their game unless:

1. They know what's expected of them (and often you need to show or model the expectations to them).
2. Training is in place to complete the expected tasks in an
outstanding fashion
3. They practice, practice, practice.
4. Leaders and peers shadow/observe team members carrying out their tasks (directly, not listening from the other room like one manager told me).
5. Feedback is provided, both immediate and on-going (like during staff meetings or periodic training or practice sessions).

Both training and practice should include role-playing in front of the rest of the team...people don't think it's always fun, but the way the leadership approaches role-playing has a lot to do with how it's accepted by the group. Constructive feedback should be provided, "this is what I think Bob did great and these are the areas I think Bob could do even better" or words to that effect.

If your team makes practice a regular habit, then when a team member is not feeling 100% "there" on a given day, or if you're short-handed and people are scurrying around to get everything done, or if something else out of the ordinary is occuring, then you don't have to worry about how they'll interact with your customers...they'll just fall back on the way they practice.

Practice won't make you perfect, but, if it's a regular part of your team's activities, they will be that much closer than ever before.

Hiring Awareness Tip

Hiring people is always a crap-shoot, isn't it? We hope we're hiring the best person for the job, but it's really hard to tell what we're getting.

I learned a very important tip from a friend a couple of years ago that I wished I'd known way before then. He told me, "remember, when you're interviewing candidates, they are probably at their best right then. This is when they're minding their Ps and Qs. If you don't LOVE them during the interview, you probably won't later either."

I've hired a lot of people and a lot of them have been candidates who I thought were pretty good, but I didn't love them. What I sometimes did was convince myself and others that a) I just needed a body and it didn't matter that much what they were like as long as they didn't have a criminal record, b) the candidate was good enough, or c) that they probably just didn't interview that well and they'd get better. I was often wrong and regretted my decisions.

In business, we often have dual messaging coming at us or from us regarding hiring. The overt directive is typically to hire the best candidate (the one who can do the best job and gel with the rest of the team or organization) and not push the fit. The unspoken directive is to get a body right away. Now, rarely do both of these directives get accomplished simultaneously. Both are important, but the first one...don't push the fit...should take precedence every time. When you examine the cost in time and money and headaches to hire, train, discipline and terminate someone, it really doesn't make sense just to fill the position.

There's a lot more that goes into hiring than just my tip today, but still...if you don't love them during the interview, you probably won't love them later.