The Performance Improvement Blog

Meetings: Love Them or Leave Them

Why is it that after all that has been said and written about wasteful meetings, managers continue to conduct meetings that are unnecessary and wasteful?  Carson Tate writes in the New York Times:

The meeting culture that is dominating corporate America is unsustainable and unproductive.
How many meetings did you attend last week that didn’t even have an agenda? How many resulted in a new idea? And at how many meetings did you think, “Why am I even here?”

Time is a commodity. And time spent in a meeting should generate a return on investment. But how often do we think about our time that way, and set expectations for meetings to produce real returns? In my experience working with Fortune 500 companies, the answer is rarely. This is just one result of a meeting-intensive culture.

This problem is not new and neither are the solutions. The famous John Cleese video, Meetings Bloody Meetings, was first produced in 1976 and dramatizes humorously the ineffectiveness of most meetings. As I have written in previous posts, meetings are overused and under-designed. We can no longer afford to have meetings just because that’s what we do at 1:00 on Mondays, or because the planning committee has something to report, or because the COO wants to announce a new policy. These are not good reasons to bring people together, wasting their time and energy. 

Technology has been both a blessing and a curse when it comes to meetings. On the one hand, location is no longer a barrier to group conversations. Smart phones, tablet computers, and laptops are all devices that allow people to participate in meetings remotely. On the other hand, meetings can be called with little planning and often with little consideration whether this is the best use of everyone's time.

In his 2003 book, Making Meetings Work: Achieving High Quality Group Decisions, John Tropman offers
very practical advice on how to have a useful meeting. His research on this problem found that when leaders had successful meetings they almost always had these four features:

1. Their meetings were characterized by decision accomplishment. Decisions got made in these groups. Participants appreciated the sense of closure that almost always occurred.
2. There was little decision rework. The group did not have to get together to decide again something that had already been decided or, as likely, had been avoided.
3. The decisions were good. There was a feeling, buttressed by reality as time passed, that the work of the group was of high quality. These were not just decisions made to “get something done.” They were thoughtful and reasoned, and they were actions that made a difference to the bureau, company, or agency.
4. People had fun! These were meetings that participants looked forward to. There was a sense of enjoyment and involvement. Participants felt that their time was well spent. They felt the meeting they were in was the “real” meeting. It was an authentic team experience.

Meetings can be productive, meaningful, and fun. However, this requires leadership that is intentional about the design and facilitation of these gatherings. Meetings should have a plan, involve group decision-making, and create a collective sense of accomplishment. Otherwise, there is no need to meet. 

Invisible Gorilla Strikes Again

This time it’s radiologists. In a study reported by NPR, 83% of radiologists failed to see the image of a gorilla on slides that they were reviewing for signs of cancer.  The conclusion by reporter Alix Spiegel is:

… what we're thinking about — what we're focused on — filters the world around us so aggressively that it literally shapes what we see. So, [the researcher] says, we need to think carefully about the instructions we give to professional searchers like radiologists or people looking for terrorist activity, because what we tell them to look for will in part determine what they see and don't see.

This phenomenon of selective attention permeates our society. Drivers don’t see approaching bicycles and motorcycles. Police can’t always determine who’s the victim and who’s the perpetrator in a violent situation. Soldiers responding in a conflict don’t always see the innocent bystanders in their line of sight. Teachers don’t always notice when a student for whom there are low expectations suddenly does something extraordinary.

When I was a teenager, I along with others observed a socio-drama as part of a lesson in tolerance. In this theatrical event, a crime was committed. We were asked to say who committed the crime. To us it was obvious. When the action was repeated it wasn’t so obvious and we learned about how our prejudices and perceptions influence our judgment, especially in quickly evolving situations.

And I wonder about leaders of large, complex organizations.  Do they sometimes display "selective attention"? Do they look at but not see the signs of a failing business model? Do they look at but not see the signs of a recessionary economy? Do they look at but not see managers who are not doing their jobs effectively? Do they look at but not see customers who are dissatisfied and looking elsewhere. Maybe it’s denial, but it also might be an inability to see something that is unexpected. 

Curation: Making Sense of Digital Information

So much information; so little time. This is a universal dilemma of the 21^st century. We are inundated with email, tweets, blog posts, Linkedin updates and comments, Facebook news feeds and messages, rss feeds, in addition to old-tech media like newspapers, magazines, TV, and radio.  It’s more than the human brain can comprehend. But the solution is at our fingertips. It’s called curation!

The title "curator" used to be reserved for someone who cares for the content of large cultural institutions such as galleries, museums, and libraries. These people protect and organize collections of objects for the purpose of making them physically and intellectually accessible to researchers and the public. They are professionals who have the expertise and credentials to do this kind of work.

Now the activity of curation has moved into the mainstream. Technology allows consumers of information to also be curators of information.  Steven Rosenbaum, author of Curation Nation: How to Win in a World Where Consumers are Creators, writes:

…curation is about adding value from humans who add their qualitative judgment to whatever is being gathered and organized…there is both amateur and professional curation, and the emergence of amateur or pro-sumer curators isn’t in any way a threat to professionals.

We can use technology to select, organize, present, and evolve the information that we need. We can take charge of the flow by controlling quality, timing, and topics. Users can control amount as well as when and where the information is received.

I like the description of curation used by the International Arts Movement for their online publication, Curator. They write:

In keeping with IAM’s belief that artistic excellence, as a model of “what ought to be”, paves the way for lasting, enduring humanity, The Curator seeks to encourage, promote, and uncover those artifacts of culture – those things which humans create – that inspire and embody truth, goodness, and beauty. We do this through considering and grappling with the zeitgeist.

IAM has criteria for deciding which “artifacts of culture” they will collect and how they will make these materials available to the public. People who buy into their beliefs about culture and art, will appreciate the curation that this publication does for them.

It has been difficult enough to make sense of the large number of tangible art objects. Without curation, it is impossible for consumers of information to manage the amount of digital data and objects. As Rosenbaum puts it, “The world needs thoughtful filters.” He recommends that these filters do three things: 1) make choices about which data to include; 2) endorse a small set of information; and 3) provide clarity to the information provided.

Aggregators of online information, such as Scoop.it and Zite.com, serve a useful purpose, but they don’t make choices and don’t provide clarity. Curation takes the management of information a step further, adding value to the set of data by selecting what best fits the criteria of consumers and helping consumers understand the meaning and usefulness of the information.

Learning to be Great™ is an example of curation of digital objects. Jim Stilwell and I created the site to make high quality orphan, organizational improvement tools available to organizational leaders seeking to influence change. The site narrows down the set of tools to a manageable number and brings clarity to the application of these tools. All of the material, which comes from our members, is organized into an easy-to-search, three by four matrix. The matrix has three forms of tools: 1) surveys; 2) models; and 3) solutions; and four foci: 1) individuals; 2) teams; 3) whole organizations; and 4) communities. For each tool there is an explanation of how the tool should be used and under what circumstances, as well as features and benefits. Finding organizational improvement tools can be an overwhelming task for a leader. Learning to be Great™ curates the information for leaders, hopefully contributing to their success.

Specialized sites are needed to help users find the best resources within the digital morass of cyberspace. Search is time consuming and provides no quality control. Curation is needed to make sense of it all. 

Related articles

Learning to be Great Organizations

What Gets Rewarded Gets Done

To be successful, organizations must align their reward structure with their intended goals. Eduardo Porter, in a New York Times article titled, When Public Outperforms Private in Services, writes:

The success or failure of an organization often depends on whether it can clearly identify its goals and align the interests of managers and employees to serve them. Yet whatever reward structure an organization picks can skew incentives in an undesirable way.

A lack of goal clarity and alignment can have detrimental effects. When oil companies reward profit over both safety and protecting the environment, loss of life and environmental disasters are the result. When pharmaceutical companies reward sales people only for the quantity of drugs sold, patients will be prescribed drugs they don’t need. When states judge schools on the basis of test scores, not learning, students graduate unprepared for college and work. When banks reward mortgage agents for quantity rather than quality, a high percentage of loans fail and the entire economy suffers.

I don’t think it’s a question of private vs. public. Some public institutions and government agencies reward the wrong behavior as do some businesses. I remember consulting with a nonprofit health insurance company that rewarded customer service reps for the number of phone inquiries they handled in an hour. The tradeoff was quantity of transactions for customer satisfaction. Treating a customer with respect and solving the customer’s problem were given lip service but not rewarded in practice.

The problem, as Porter says, is tradeoffs. A company that truly values customers, might have to sacrifice some portion of profit in the short term for a satisfied customer who will continue to come back to that business over the long term. A government or nonprofit that truly values its mission, might have to sacrifice some portion of revenue in order to achieve its service goals. Neither type of organization can afford to run at a deficit but neither is sustainable without alignment of rewards with goals.

A Year of “The Performance Improvement Blog” in Review

It’s time to do a little year-end reflecting on my blog posts from 2012.

Throughout last year I used this blog to illuminate important leadership and management issues. The topics ranged from creating a learning culture to increasing employee engagement to improving organizational communication to evaluating executive coaching, and more.

Out of all of these blog posts I’ve selected five that seem to have had the most interest for readers. Here are the links with a short excerpt from each post:

How to Create a Learning Culture in Organizations - Organizational learning is not about training. Rather, it's about a community of workers sharing in a process of constantly seeking improvement through new knowledge, new skills, and new applications of knowledge and skills to achieving the goals of the organization. They examine what they do, compare that to what needs to be done, reflect on what they have learned, and make the needed change in the organization.

 

Leaders Make or Break Employee Engagement - A leader’s attitude and behavior determine whether an organization has an engaged workforce or not. In other words, what leaders think and feel and say and do has a profound impact on employee satisfaction, enthusiasm for their work, desire to do their best, and commitment to go beyond their job descriptions every day. In an article for The Business Thinker, my colleague Jim Stilwell and I describe 13 ways in which leaders affect employee engagement. 

 

 

What Gets Measured Gets Done...Revisited - Measurement is not enough. An organization has to do something with those metrics in order to “get done” what needs to get done, i.e., organizational learning, performance improvement, and change. The act of measuring things like sales, customer service, product quality, teamwork, employee engagement, or learning, does not necessarily mean that anything will be done differently.

 

 

Why Evaluate Executive Coaching - CEOs and Boards are beginning to ask if the substantial investment they are making in executive coaching is paying off.  Unfortunately, we don’t know much about the impact of coaching. Studies tend to rely on surveys of executives who are being coached. But this method of studying coaching is fraught with problems.

 

 

What Do You Mean? - Dan Pallotta, president of Advertising for Humanity and HBR blogger, in a post titled “I Don't Understand What Anyone Is Saying Anymore”, writes about business jargon and how it affects communication in organizations. The blog post must have hit a nerve because it has broken the record for most comments to a single HBR Blog Network post. 

Wishing you a healthy and prosperous 2013!

Managing to Outcomes in Nonprofit Sector

This is the traditional time to reflect on trends observed during the past year. One major trend I have observed is performance management of nonprofit organizations. Actually, this is an accelerating trend that got its impetus from Peter Drucker decades ago. Nonprofits are becoming more and more focused on what McKinsey & Company calls “managing to outcomes”.  

I know, you thought all organizations managed to outcomes. Not so, particularly in the social sector. Nonprofits have been more like manage-to-what-makes-you-feel-good or manage-to-spend-the-money. It has been less about results and more about the process of doing the work and providing services. Now a shift is occurring towards greater recognition of the importance of measuring outcomes and using that information for learning. That is, learning how to be a more effective organization and how to increase impact of programs and services.

If your organization is involved in philanthropic activity, if you serve on the board of a nonprofit organization (or NGO), or if you work for a nonprofit or a philanthropic foundation, or if you donate to nonprofits, then you should pay special attention to this trend. It will affect what you do and how your money is spent.

This intensified focus on outcomes and learning is a result of a confluence of factors in the growing and increasingly important U.S. nonprofit sector (According to the Foundation Center, “In 2010, nonprofits contributed $804.8 billion to the gross domestic product (GDP); this equates to 5.5 percent of GDP… the nonprofit sector employed 13.7 million people.”). The factors that are contributing to the change include:

• Increasing demand for services for the poor, the disadvantaged, the elderly, and the marginalized
• Less public money for social programs (Mario Morino calls this the “Age of Scarcity”.)
• More people, and a wider spectrum of people, interested in “doing good”
• Greater demand by social investors for evidence of impact
• Greater demand from policy-makers for evidence of impact
• More leaders on nonprofit and foundation boards who want to see results
• Increasing professionalization of the sector (e.g., MBAs leading large nonprofits)

So the need for services is growing while resources are dwindling and, at the same time, funders and boards of directors want more accountability and more impact from their investment. Because of all of these factors, there is pressure on the sector to develop more efficient and effective organizations. These are organizations that embrace a culture of measurement and performance improvement. Mary Winkler of the Urban Institute emphasized this point when she said:

…organizational culture and a predisposition to measurement and managing toward results is perhaps the single most important ingredient to success. A culture of continuous improvement needs to be evidenced at the top. Equally important, however, is the extent to which the culture of continuous improvement is integrated at every level of the organization. 

That means having leaders who are willing to learn from what they do and apply that learning to improving organizations, as well as their programs and services. This is not an easy transition for many of these leaders who have been accountable for only process and output in the past. They will need the support of funders, staff, constituents, consultants, and the public at large, to make this change.

Learning to be Great Organizations

In a previous post, I wrote about the importance of democratizing organizational learning. I argued that organizations need to be continuously learning for the purpose of improving performance and achieving business goals. And in another post I wrote that for this to happen, organizational leaders need tools. That is, they need methods for learning from the organization and for learning how to learn from the organization. I wrote, “If we are going to democratize learning in organizations, we need to teach everyone how to learn and how to use tools to discover useful information. We need to make learning tools accessible to all employees when and where they need them.”

Developers of organizational learning tools, whether they be faculty, internal leaders, or free agents, have very few outlets for getting those tools to the people who need them in a fast and cost-effective way. Major publishing houses take too long, cost too much, and have limited distribution channels. Penelope Trunk addresses this problem in her blog post, “From PR to profits: the problems with publishing.” One could challenge her motivation for writing the piece, but her criticism of traditional book publishing, from my experience, is accurate.

Many tools, such as employee surveys, graphical representations of models, or steps to solving organizational problems, do not require a book. These tools could be made available in shorter forms and without all the trappings of a best seller. However, simply posting materials on the author’s Web site is not the answer either.

Another avenue for distribution is professional associations. These guilds develop and sell their own materials as a major source of revenue. They often work with a select cadre of member-authors and the products can be quite pricey. The American Evaluation Association is an exception to this with their AEA365 blog, a vehicle for any member to post an article and links to related resources. It is intended to be a free exchange of information and tools among members. The Employee Engagement Network is another example of a place to share information about tools for improving performance, specifically by increasing employee engagement. Although both sites serve an important purpose, neither is designed for authors to publish tools or for managers to find what they need when they need it.

It is wonderful that many free resources are available within professional communities. However, an alternative is needed where creators of organizational improvement tools can distribute those tools quickly and easily to any leader when and where those tools are needed.  And to make high quality tools available, creators must be compensated, even in a small way, for their expertise and effort. This is the space that my business partners and I hope to fill with Learning2BGreat.com.  Anyone who has created materials that can be used for organizational improvement may sell their wares from the site. The author decides what it is worth and sets the price. Anyone who needs a tool to help them help their organization may purchase and download the appropriate tool from the site. The tools are organized in topics and linked to information about the authors. L2BG is a virtual marketplace for connecting professional resources with the people who need them, on-demand. This ecommerce site is an experiment that we hope will continue to grow and have a profound effect on improving organizations of all types. 

Democratization of Organizational Learning

Organizational learning has, for too long, been owned by consultants and chief training and learning officers. Any effort to learn how to improve leadership, management, team building, communication, planning, or other organizational skills, has started with these external and internal gatekeepers. This has made learning generally inaccessible to the people with the greatest need. 

This is why Jim Stilwell and I have created Learning to be Great^tm. This Web site is an online
marketplace where internal leaders and managers, as well as external consultants and authors, can self-publish their organizational improvement products and where they can find practical, inexpensive learning tools when and where they need them. 

This rapidly-growing store has materials that can be used to:

• Enhance leadership
• Facilitate coaching
• Increase employee engagement
• Assess culture
• Improve decision-making
• Conduct strategic planning
• Evaluate programs and services
• Maximize organizational learning

Our intent is to de-mystify organizational learning and give all managers the tools they need to be successful. Learning is everybody's business. Everyone should be able to quickly find tools that will help them understand a situation, improve performance, and develop a new capability along the way. And people who have designed useful tools should have a way to get them to the people who need them. This is our hope for Learning to be Great^tm. Please let me know what you think of the site. 

Doing Good Effectively

It’s that giving time of year again. And whether you donate to charities or you are a philanthropist that gives grants to nonprofits, you should care about organizational effectiveness and efficiency.

One commonly used indicator of effective management in organizations that do-good is the percentage of their budgets that goes to administrative costs. The rule of thumb is between 11% and 13%. This is a simple and easily calculated and understandable measure. Unfortunately, it’s not the best indicator. Overhead matters, but effectiveness matters more.

Tina Rosenberg, in a New York Times opinion piece, identifies additional criteria that should be used in judging charitable organizations. She writes that the best organizations…

• Aim to solve the most serious problems (in the normal calculus, this means that providing bed nets to save children from malaria ranks above helping public radio stations or art museums).
• Use interventions that work.
• Employ cost-effective strategies (trachoma surgeries, rather than training guide dogs, to help the blind).
• Are competent and honest. The percentage of donations spent on overhead is one measure of these qualities.
• Can make good use of each additional dollar. This is the hardest point to assess, but it asks whether the group has the program on the ground to use your money well, and whether your donation will make something happen that otherwise wouldn’t.

I would also ask these questions:

• Is the program and the organization sustainable? Assuming the problem being addressed requires a long-term solution, I would want to know if the nonprofit has the leadership, infrastructure, and funding from other sources to stay with the solution as long as is necessary.
• Does the nonprofit have a culture that is consistent with my values? The leaders might have the best of intentions, but if they treat their staff and volunteers poorly, if they don’t pay their vendors, if they relate to low-income and minorities in a disparaging and condescending way, then I want to know this.
• Are they using the best interventions available? Maybe they are using interventions that work but maybe there are other interventions that are more effective and less costly. And maybe there are other interventions that should be tried to test their efficacy.

Toby Ord, in the blog Giving What We Can, argues that we should mainly be looking at cost-effectiveness. He believes that we have a moral imperative, especially when it comes to global health, to support programs that get the most bang for the buck. Ord writes:

…merely moving funding from one intervention to a more cost-effective one can produce almost as much benefit as adding an equal amount of additional funding. This is unintuitive since it isn’t the case when one option is merely 10% or 30% better than another. However, when one option is 10 times or 100 times better, as is often the case in global health, redirecting funding is so important that it is almost as good as adding new funding directly towards the superior intervention. In times of global austerity and shrinking budgets, it is good to know how much more can be done within existing ones.

People give to charities and other nonprofits for all kinds of reasons. Some because of a religious calling; some for the prestige; some because of a personal connection to the agency or the cause; some for a tax deduction; some because of peer pressure (for example, they serve on the board of the agency); some to honor a relative by making a donation in that person’s name; and some to make a difference in society. Regardless of the reason, we should be concerned about effectiveness and what it costs to be effective. No one wants to throw their money away and people receiving the money want to be proud of what they do. 

Leader Learning Library

Online resources for leaders and wannabe leaders are quite extensive these days. We are witnessing the democratization of leadership, making the "servant leader" even more possible. Everyone can become a leader (as well as an effective follower) by learning about leadership when and where it is most convenient and applicable.

But it's not easy to find Web links that have been screened for quality and topics. Masters in Leadership has put together 100 Exemplary Sites for Future Leaders. And I have the honor of having my blog included in that list.

One of the very useful features of the list is the categorization of topics. These include:

• Leadership Coaching
• Team Building
• Business Leadership
• Women in Leadership
• General Leadership

While Masters in Leadership has created an excellent resource, that has something for everybody, as with any best-of list, each of us can think of people and organizations that we would have included. For example, I would have selected the sites of Wally Bock and John Baldoni for a hundred-best list. I hope Masters in Leadership continues to monitor the sites on their list and remove and add links as these Web-based sources of information change over time.