Make Sure Your Message is Heard

The ways in which you communicate can often be just as important as the substance of that communication.

Evaluate your own abilities. By merely being aware, you can play to your strengths and mitigate weaknesses. Sometimes a single trait can encompass both strengths and weaknesses, says Elaine Tweedy, director of the University of Scranton Small Business Development Center. A dominant, confident individual, for example, can probably run a good meeting and offer his own opinions while keeping people focused. On the other hand, someone who is too dominant might discourage creative input from others. Personality assessments, such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and the DISC evaluation, can help managers get a handle on their own strengths and weaknesses. These evaluations are often best done in groups so the contrast between types is vivid and the team develops strategies to work more effectively.

Sharpen your message. According to research cited by the Society for Human Resource Management, people normally remember only three to five points from any communication. So keep it short and sharp. This is especially true if your message is being delivered by e-mail or memo. Your conclusions or main points belong at the top as bullet points. An elaborate setup is counterproductive, says Galbreath; readers discern condescension when a big setup attempts to spin bad news, and when one introduces good news, they stop reading before they get to it. Keep the paragraphs short and the whole document to no more than a page. "If someone taped a $20 bill to the second page of every memo in America," says Galbreath, "nobody would ever find one."

1.6. Holding of meetings

As a manager, you will have to hold meetings. You should do your best to make them effective. We’ve all been to them – the meetings that drag on, people who ramble, agendas written on the back of an envelope or spur of the moment, any-other-business surprises, lack of information, insufficient notice. Here are tips for more effective meeting.

1. Don't Meet

Avoid a meeting if the same information could be covered in a memo, e-mail or brief report. One of the keys to having more effective meetings is differentiating between the need for one-way information dissemination and two-way information sharing. To disseminate information you can use a variety of other communication media, such as sending an e-mail or posting the information on your company's intranet. If you want to be certain you have delivered the right message, you can schedule a meeting to simply answer questions about the information you have sent. By remembering to ask yourself, "Is a meeting the best way to handle this?" you'll cut down on wasted meeting time and restore your group's belief that the meetings they attend are necessary.

2. Set Objectives for the Meeting

Set objectives before the meeting! Before planning the agenda for the meeting, write down a phrase or several phrases to complete the sentence: By the end of the meeting, I want the group to… Depending on the focus of your meeting, your ending to the sentence might include phrases such as: …be able to list the top three features of our newest product, …have generated three ideas for increasing our sales, …understand the way we do business with customers, …leave with an action plan, …decide on a new widget supplier, or …solve the design problem.

One benefit of setting objectives for the meeting is to help you plan the meeting. The more concrete your meeting objectives, the more focused your agenda will be. A second important benefit of having specific objectives for each meeting is that you have a concrete measure against which you can evaluate that meeting. Were you successful in meeting the objectives? Why or why not? Is another meeting required? Setting meeting objectives allows you to continuously improve your effective meeting process.

3. Provide an Agenda Beforehand

Provide all participants with an agenda before the meeting starts. Your agenda needs to include a brief description of the meeting objectives, a list of the topics to be covered and a list stating who will address each topic and for how long. When you send the agenda, you should include the time, date and location of the meeting and any background information participants will need to know to hold an informed discussion on the meeting topic. What's the most important thing you should do with your agenda? Follow it closely!

4. Assign Meeting Preparation

Give all participants something to prepare for the meeting, and that meeting will take on a new significance to each group member. For problem-solving meetings, have the group read the background information necessary to get down to business in the meeting. Ask each group member to think of one possible solution to the problem to get everyone thinking about the meeting topic. For example, to start a sales meeting on a positive note, have all participants recall their biggest success since the last meeting and ask one person to share his success with the group. For less formal meetings or brainstorming sessions, ask a trivia question related to the meeting topic and give the correct answer in the first few minutes of the meeting. These tips are sure-fire ways to warm up the group and direct participants' attention to the meeting objectives.

5. Assign Action Items

Don't finish any discussion in the meeting without deciding how to act on it. Listen for key comments that flag potential action items and don't let them pass by without addressing them during your meeting. Statements such as We should really…, that's a topic for a different meeting…, or I wonder if we could… are examples of comments that should trigger action items to get a task done, hold another meeting or further examine a particular idea. Assigning tasks and projects as they arise during the meeting means that your follow-through will be complete. Addressing off-topic statements during the meeting in this way also allows you to keep the meeting on track. By immediately addressing these statements with the suggestion of making an action item to examine the issue outside of the current meeting, you show meeting participants that you value their input as well as their time.

6. Examine Your Meeting Process

Assign the last few minutes of every meeting as time to review the following questions: What worked well in this meeting? What can we do to improve our next meeting? Every participant should briefly provide a point-form answer to these questions. Answers to the second question should be phrased in the form of a suggested action. For example, if a participant's answer is stated as Jim was too long-winded, ask the participant to re-phrase the comment as an action. The statement We should be more to-the-point when stating our opinions is a more constructive suggestion. Remember – don't leave the meeting without assessing what took place and making a plan to improve the next meeting!

7. Make meeting fun.

One manager has invented very interesting thing: to each meeting member he gave five coins and when they wanted to speak they had to spend a penny. Once they had used up their coins they were done and dusted and couldn’t say anything more. It was supposed to make people really cautious about speaking and reluctant to spend all their coins on trivia. It is a very funny way, but also it would get you quite a reputation as an ineffectual meeting leader. As would other suggestions such as:

• Fancy dress

• Food and drink (unless it is lunchtime, in which case it is functional not fun)

• Games, quizzes or contests of any sort

• Having small surprises such as chocolates strapped under the chairs

• A talking stick

• Blindfolds

• Letting the most junior member chair the meeting

All of these head towards farce, ruin and idiocy. Don’t go there.

So how can you fun things up without looking silly? Well, for a start, fun doesn’t have to mean silly or stupid or unfunny.

Fun means not being stuffy, allowing people to be themselves and to bring their own contribution. Fun means allowing people to share things that have made them laugh without being frowned on. Fun is about letting people tell stories or anecdotes that lighten the mood. You should just know when to say: ‘Right, back to businesses’.

To conclude this chapter, I’d like to emphasize, that we all have to work with people. These may be loosely known as a team or a department or a squad or a crew – even a posse. It doesn’t matter. The mistake a lot of managers make is to think they are managing people. They think people are their tools, their stock-in-trade. Make the people successful and you have the successful manager – or so the theory goes.

But unfortunately this is a myth and we need to see that the real role of the manager is to manage processes rather than people. People can manage themselves if you let them. What you need to be concentrating on is the real job of management – the strategy. The team is merely a means to fulfilling that end. If all your people could be replaced by machines we would still have to have strategy, still we have to be managing the process.

Of course, we, as managers, have to work with real flesh-and-blood people and we have to know what motivates them, how they think and feel, why they come to work, why they give their best, what they are afraid of, what they hope and dream for. We shall have to encourage them, coach them, give them the resources to do their job and manage themselves, oversee their processes and set their strategy for them. But we won’t manage them. We will let them manage themselves and we shall concentrate on our real role as a manager.

CHAPTER 2

Date: 2015-01-12; view: 907