When a meeting is oriented around an agenda, the focus becomes making sure that all the topics listed are talked about in the time they have been allotted.

This means that if item X is scheduled to be discussed for 15 minutes, from 10:15 to 10:30, that’s what happens. But what if item X turns out to need an hour of conversation? What if the dialogue around item X is so engaging, compelling and important that people want to keep chatting about it beyond the allotted time frame?

In most cases, the discussion, regardless of how important or meaningful, will be tabled to a later date to make way for the other scheduled items on the agenda.

The opposite is also true. If item X is slated for a 15-minute discussion, but really only requires five minutes, rarely will the agenda be adjusted. In most cases, the team members will simply fill up the time talking about the less important aspects of the item until the designated time is up.

So instead of having your meetings be oriented around a set agenda, with topics and the time allotted to them, we suggest orienting your meetings around the outcomes and results you want to accomplish.

The difference looks like this:

In an agenda-driven meeting, you have 30 minutes allocated to discussing the budget.

In an outcome-oriented meeting, you declare the objective of having everyone agree on how to reduce the budget by 15%.

So the next time you want to have a powerful meeting oriented around results, ask yourself:

1. What are the specific outcomes I want this meeting to achieve?
2. What results do I want to come out of this meeting?
3. What are the most important results I want to walk away having accomplished?

How have agendas impacted your meetings? We would love to hear your comments.

The post Should You Axe Your Meeting Agenda? appeared first on Quantum Performance.

In a weak economy, it’s of critical importance that leaders practice “giving back” to the company culture, even as things are being taken away.

In our experience, it’s deflating and demoralizing to a workforce when things are only being taken away and nothing is being put back in. Leaders often underestimate the level of upset brewing among staff and even misread the fact that people are not complaining to mean that they are not bothered by the current state of the company.

Worse still, some leaders take the position that since the job market is tight, people cannot leave so there is no need to take care of them.

These conclusions ultimately lead to a situation where, when the market does come back and opportunities open up, employees — who are resentful of how things were handled during the difficult times — leave.

Even in the face of reducing expenses, you need to infuse conversations with energy, confidence, hope and a sense of the future.

One important thing you can do to maintain employee morale and balance things out as the budget gets rightsized is to rally everyone around the new strategy. Start by telling employees the truth about how things are — even if the news is bad, they can handle it. Involve them in the process of fixing and improving things, developing new products and finding new customers. By having the courage to be sincere and transparent, you cut rumors and speculation off at the pass and engage employees’ commitment to both deal with today’s reality and plan for tomorrow’s recovery.

What are you doing to strike a balance between budget constraints and employee morale? We would love to hear your comments.

The post Balancing The Budget And Employee Morale appeared first on Quantum Performance.

It’s very easy today for people to become paralyzed by fear and uncertainty. This places a greater demand on leaders to keep staff focused on the prospect of a brighter, yet plausible, future. This week’s post examines how managers can do this by helping their staff learn to think strategically about the company and their own careers.

We have found that encouraging strategic thinking from the top of the organization to the shop floor is largely a matter of executive action and intention. In our experience, when executives make strategy development an activity exclusive to the top members of the organization, they discourage strategic thinking.

Specifically, executives and managers stifle strategic thinking by not actively being open to others’ feedback, pushback and ideas. When people feel that their suggestions are not being met with receptiveness, they will not participate in a strategic discussion even when given the chance.

To overcome this dynamic, we advise getting everyone in the company involved in strategic conversations. If you demonstrate that you are committed to other people’s ideas by incorporating and promoting them, you will encourage people to think strategically.

One easy process is to pick several areas where you want to create a breakthrough in performance and form teams. Gather people from varying levels and departments, creating a blue team and red team for each desired area of breakthrough. Then have a friendly competition for ideas on how to achieve the desired leap forward.

To encourage maximum strategic thinking, tell the groups that you are looking for “out-of-the-box, yet plausible” ways to take the organization to the next level.

Another common contributor to hindered strategic thinking is asking your staff to always put forth their tactical ideas, but never their strategic ones.

Executives can encourage higher-order thinking by making sure meetings are balanced out between time dedicated to discussing long-term strategic issues and short-term tactical ones. One of the biggest complaints we hear in companies is that all the meetings are about tactical items. Employees complain that time is never spent having conversations about the bigger picture and longer-term issues.

What can you do today to encourage strategic thinking? We would love to hear your comments.

The post How To Cultivate Strategic Thinking In Your Company appeared first on Quantum Performance.

The problem fundamentally is one of ownership. Not knowing who owns what, whom one really reports to and what authority one really has often becomes an excuse for not taking responsibility for producing results.

People avoid accountability for the end goal of improving bottom-line profits by claiming conflicting priorities or lack of cooperation as the cause. “They” (meaning the other departments) “won’t come to our meetings to help us,” is the chronic complaint often accompanying a throwing up of collective hands.

But one myth that must be unwound in the matrix environment is that you can only affect things over which you have authority.

We hear this all the time from managers who tell us they can’t generate true alignment, effective communication and a strong sense of team with stakeholders who don’t report to them or in a group over which they have no authority.

But to be successful in a matrix environment, managers first have to abandon that paradigm and engage in a more empowering perspective — that everything is a function of influence, partnership and alignment of shared goals.

In reality, people have the capacity and the desire to be focused on, loyal to and aligned with visions, commitments and objectives they believe in, having nothing to do with structure. In the end, staff loyalty and passion can be driven by their relationship to a goal.

What are you doing to create teamwork in your matrix environment? We would love to hear your comments.

The post Collaboration In A Matrix Environment appeared first on Quantum Performance.

The fundamental difference between an agenda-driven vs. a results-driven meeting is that they elicit two very distinct types of behaviors from team members.

When a meeting is oriented around topics and an agenda, it brings about a greater degree of opinion swapping. For example: Someone expresses his or her point of view on a new product, provoking someone else to state his or hers. That then reminds someone else of something tangential which they share, and soon these conversations begin to resemble a yo-yo.

But a meeting that is oriented around outcomes provokes conversations that focus people on saying something that has to do with achieving a result. It cuts back on the tangents and encourages team members to put forth offers, recommendations and commitments that move the action forward.

Some simple ways to make sure your meetings are result vs. agenda oriented include:

• Declare the meeting objectives at the beginning of the meeting, rather than by the amount of time allocated to each topic. Encourage spending as much time as needed on each item to achieve the stated objective(s) of the meeting.

• Invite people to the meeting who will gain from or contribute to the realization of the stated objectives of the meeting. Don’t invite spectators or people for political reasons.

• Complete the meeting by summarizing the commitments made, not the topics discussed. Too often, the minutes of a meeting reflect what was talked about, not the promises made.

• Don’t tolerate conversations that don’t directly forward the outcomes you want to achieve.

By focusing on these guidelines, your next off-site or team meeting can go from drowning in conversation to being infused with commitment.

How do you make your meetings effective? We would love to hear your comments.

The post Different Behavior Means Better Meetings appeared first on Quantum Performance.

In last week’s blog post, we discussed the way that leaders’ actions impact the cultivation of strategic thinking within their companies. This week, we continue the theme by examining the role that micromanaging plays in the process.

Heed the warning. Leaders who micromanage create an environment of compliance where people won’t think strategically and don’t act as partners.

Micromanaging suffocates strategic thinking because it forces people to interact at a tactical level only. It requires people to protect their world, and a huge amount of their energy just goes into how to survive and keep their boss off their back.

One research study on micromanagement by Dr. Robert Hurley PhD at Fordham University found that 30 to 35% of executives succeed as managers but faltered as leaders when they found themselves in higher-level positions. “For this sizable group of under-performing executives, the underlying root cause is compulsive micromanagement caused by perfectionist tendencies. By micromanagement we mean an over-controlling style that inappropriately inhibits the people the executive needs to mobilize,” says Dr. Hurley.

To counteract this, we suggest that executives and managers ask their staff to think about what they would do if they were put in charge of a particular situation, department or organization. Ask your staff what they would start, stop or continue, then discuss the responses as a group so people can learn to think strategically at a level or two above their current job.

Just remember that you will never get any company strategy perfect, rational or right enough to work without having engagement and commitment at all levels. Encouraging your staff to participate in strategic planning and practice strategic thinking is key to creating a strategy that does not just get talked, but walked.

Cheat Sheet of Strategic Thinking Dos and Don’ts

Do:

• Actively ask for input from all departments and levels.
• Promote and incorporate others’ ideas.
• Ask your staff what they would start, stop or continue in your position.
• Routinely balance out your meetings by discussing both strategic and tactical issues.

Don’t:

• Make strategic development an exclusive club limited to the higher-ups.
• Stifle strategic thinking by not being open to and acting on others’ feedback.
• Try and maintain control by micromanaging.
• Solely focus on and encourage tactical thinking in meetings.

How has strategic thinking been hindered in your organization? We would love to hear your comments.

The post Micromanagement Is The Enemy of Strategic Thinking appeared first on Quantum Performance.

• Where are we headed?
• What are we building?
• How will we know when we get there?
• What are we going to focus on to drive our success?
• What are the key steps to take to address those areas of focus?

Many of the strategies we see in our consulting practice are vague rather than clear. For example:

We want to be world-class vs. We want to be leaders in our industry as measured by X.

The other common flaw we encounter is that many strategic plans exist in a binder on a shelf, but fail to be lived out in the everyday way people work. Is your strategy alive in your leaders’, management’s and staff’s day-to-day actions? Most aren’t.

A truly bold and compelling strategy is ultimately one where staff can see the part they play in its accomplishment and participate daily in its fulfillment.

Is your strategy vague or bold and compelling? We would love to hear your comments.

The post Is Your Company Strategy Bold and Compelling? appeared first on Quantum Performance.

Regardless, the prerequisite for all of these is the ability to have open, honest and straight conversations. It’s not what you can talk about that makes a difference at work, it’s what you can’t. It’s always what you are not dealing with that’s controlling and shaping your team.

If you want things to be different in your organization, then you have to develop the willingness and ability to talk about what you are not talking about. Here’s one way to get started.

In functional groups, ask each member of the team to write down their background conversations (their stories, opinions, judgments, ideas and perceptions) about the company and the other departments within the organization they interact with.

For example: We had one manufacturing group whose background conversation about the engineering group went something like this:

Engineering is always building prototypes, which they design in partnership with the sales group and then take and sell to the customers. But they never consult with us (Manufacturing) about our capacity to build these or seek our input regarding the design.

This leads to customers saying, “Yes, we want that,” and engineering then handing off the design to us and our struggling to deliver what they promised. We resent engineering for not including us in the process and feel like they view us as an obstacle to success. The net result of this is poor customer satisfaction, loss of customers, poor product quality and lots of failures in output.

In order to address this issue, we brought manufacturing and engineering together to discuss their background conversations about each other, and, within 18 months, both profitability and customer satisfaction soared.

The bottom line is that you have to be honest about things that are not working company wide. If everyone knows people are nervous about layoffs or competition, put it on the table. Discuss it. One of the myths is that you have to always be positive and pump people up. But the most refreshing thing is honesty — both about the good and the bad.

What are you not talking about in your company that you need to be talking about? We would love to hear your comments.

The post Talking About What You Are Not Talking About appeared first on Quantum Performance.

But our observation is that how well communicated a strategy is, is far more important than how logical or well researched it is. The effectiveness of any strategy is directly proportional to the level of ownership, commitment and accountability among the executive team. A strategy is only as good as the levels of commitment the people who are accountable to fulfilling it, possess.

Here are the essential fours steps necessary to create total strategic commitment and alignment.

Step one: Do a commitment audit and tell the truth about the current levels of ownership, commitment and accountability within the organization. Ask people to be blunt about the degree to which they understand – and believe in – your current strategic plan.

Step two: Craft a bold and compelling future. Help your leadership team roll the clock forward two to three years from now. What is a clear, concise and well-articulated 15- to 20-word statement that describes what you are committed to building as an organization?

Step three: Define your specific success criteria. What are the three, four or five key measurable outcomes that will let you know you have reached that future state?

Step four: Get everyone on board with these. This means cascading the process through the ranks of management, sharing the content of the strategy with all levels of staff and listening to and addressing issues of competence, sincerity and courage.

Remember, the issue is not, “What is the right solution?” but, “What will people buy into, take ownership for, believe in and commit to?” When staff buy into a strategy, it’s because they trust their leaders are telling the truth about the need for it, they believe that their leaders have the courage and resolve to address the real issues, and they have faith their leaders are competent to do what needs to be done in order to implement the strategy.

On top of this, when staff feel cared for, concerned about and respected, they will naturally support and contribute to the strategy being realized.

How much buy-in do you have for your current company strategy? We would love to hear your comments.

The post 4 Steps To Creating Total Strategic Alignment appeared first on Quantum Performance.

Q. What makes someone a good listener?

A. Most people speak and listen with the tip of the iceberg. What I mean by that is the speaker talks about what’s at the tip, but they know all the ice that is underneath. The listener hears the tip and assumes it’s all of the ice.

Q. How can a listener get to the ice, so to speak?

A. To begin with, you need to ask yourself whether you are listening to understand or just preparing to speak. Listening requires inquiry. Once you have heard the tip of the iceberg, you come back and let the speaker know, “Here’s what I heard,” or, “It seems like you might be saying X. What else am I missing?” The listener needs to work from the presumption that the speaker has told you something for which there is a greater depth you have yet to perceive.

Q. How does inquiry differ from active listening?

A. We have all been through some form of active listening course — and we have all been the victim of someone who has been through one of those courses. The problem with active listening is that you can quote back exactly what the person said to you, but not really understand any of it. When you practice inquiry, you might say the words back but with the intention of making certain you understand – not just that you heard the words. Then you are asking the person:

• Tell me more?
• That’s interesting. What else?
• This is what I’m hearing. What am I missing?

Q. People don’t seem very skilled at inquiry. Why do you think that is?

A. The other side of inquiry is advocacy. We are trained from an early age in schools to pick a point of view and put forth an argument about its validity. This happens when we write papers, speak in front of a group, debate, give a speech, etc. So we are highly trained in advocacy, but not inquiry. That’s where the breakdown occurs.

Q. Do you think high performers practice more inquiry?

A. Yes. Seeking to understand before moving forward is key to listening, and high performers naturally assume that they are missing something and want to find out what that is and build on it. High performers know that it does you no harm to assume that something is missing.

Q. How does this type of listening impact high performance overall?

A. When inquiry is being practiced by the listener, the speaker won’t feel defensive because nothing is coming at them. Because of this, the speaker will be more relaxed, and, as any athlete can tell you, a relaxed muscle is a faster and more agile muscle. You have to be in a relaxed state for high performance, so when the listener helps the speaker relax — by practicing inquiry — higher performance is naturally achieved.

What listening challenges do you face in your work?  We would love to hear your comments.

The post Russell Bishop Editor of the Huffington Post on Listening appeared first on Quantum Performance.