18 Jun Follow up , Follow up …Meetings

Follow up …Follow up and Meetings

Over the last 3 decades, as per global survey, the time spend by everybody in the organization for follow up meetings has increased to 23 hours per week, from 10 hours per week. Sounds crazy, but if you sum up your meeting times, you might end up with similar numbers.

During mentoring sessions with the clients, when I ask them to calculate, the no. of hours spent in meetings on the subjects like, Improvements, creativity, innovation VS follow-up, review, heads up, as subjects and most of them come with similar figures to what is reflecting globally …30% (looks exaggerated )is spend on topics like improvements and innovations and 70% or more is spent on follow up, review, heads types topics.

One of the largest conglomerate could find that if they optimize their meetings time globally, they could reduce around 15% of their manpower or they can avoid new recruitment by 15%.

When Harvard surveyed 182 senior managers in a range of industries at different times: 65% said meetings keep them away from completing their own work, 71% said meetings are unproductive and inefficient, 64% said meetings come at the expense of deep thinking, 62% said meetings miss opportunities to bring the team closer together.

The basic reason why meetings happen on” follow up” topics, is a lack of trust from the manager’s side and lack of ownership from team members, but still, there are several aspects attached to it as follows

1)     Unclear/unplanned delegation of tasks from managers

2)     Lack of planning for the future, resulting in war room meetings (I feel surprised to see, some of the organizations have permanently created meeting rooms, by the name “War Room”, as if they have principally accepted that, they will never come out of war like situation (chaotic).

3)     Lack of ownership by team members …” I will do only when I am being followed up”, this approach by team members forces managers to take close follow-up thru meetings.

4)     Unclear KRAs, the law of the Theory of constraints says that “I will be behaving the way you will measure me “, so it’s important for managers to clearly define the measurables.

5)     Lack of “time management “from both managers and team members: Everybody has 8-9 hours every day and if you don’t know how to effectively use those, you are likely to miss many tasks and you are likely to spend hours n hours in explaining that in meetings.

6)     Micromanagement: Many of the managers either don’t trust their team members or they do not know what to do with their time or they themselves have performance issues; they keep inviting many meetings for conducting even micro-level task reviews.

7)Most of the management does not see Follow up, as a problem.

What’s the solution?

There is no straight answer, but there are multiple actions that on need to take with consistency

I generally ask managers or even entrepreneurs to follow some basic rules to reduce the follow-up and follow-up meetings

1)     Be cautious while selecting new employees, apart from technical skills, look for self-motivated talent …it will pay off in long run.

2)     Ensure proper training on your organizational technologies, culture, and functions, even if the candidate has rich experience.

3)     Create a very clear organization, defining who is ACCOUNTABLE for what. This will avoid meetings and follow up in those cases, where the time is spent just figuring out “who was supposed to do it”.

4)     Enforce time management as a culture irrespective of position or function.

5)     Keep a close watch on those team members, who need “follow up” …just to remind them of their tasks. These are the weakest links in the organization, either elevate those or eliminate those.

6)     Keep watch on those managers, who try to do “micro-management “out of their own weaknesses/insecurities and waste the time of team members in the meetings …elevate or eliminate them.

7)     Develop a culture at TOP, where Follow up should be seen as a criminal act and Ownership should be nourished, rewarded, and appreciated.

Though this looks like a completely corporate topic, if we implement this in our personal life, it will definitely positively impact our relationships too….

18 Jun It’s Always A Pleasure Dealing With You.

It’s Always A Pleasure Dealing With You.

In most of the business mentoring sessions, I hear one common thing from my clients “Irrespective of we close the deals or not, we are not able to establish a healthy relationship with the customer “.

True, that’s the problem we have, but we also have numerous opposite examples, where even without closing a single deal, for a long time, there is a very healthy relationship with the customer or let’s say, prospective customers.

While building customer relationships, we tempt to forget that, basically we all are humans, and irrespective of the position you are in, you will surely reflect all those human behaviors.

Some important tips, which I have learnt over the last two decades to build a healthy relationship with the customer…irrespective of whether you immediately gain business out of it or not are

1)Never forget that your “target” is a human mind and body and its behavior cannot be captured /predicted in any business plan or sales plan..be real with your customer, be human

2) Call/meet/text your customer …not only for season greetings and business inquiries but otherwise also.

3) One cannot be always at the receiving end in front of the customer, always expecting an inquiry or business. But one needs to “Give” some value-added information, which can help customer to improve their knowledge. Share new technology, try to help in some instances even without a business deal, and give some life-improving tips.

4)Help your customer to understand the current deal in a better way, if they lack some knowledge ..make sure, in the event, you don’t help your competition 😊 .

5) If there are mistakes in the “Deal document” by customers, proactively inform them, though those might be of your benefit. Don’t forget, soon or later they will know those. If they find it in the future, you look either a cheater or an ignorant.

6) Sometimes, you end up being superior to the customer in terms of business size or technology …avoid showing it off, they know it.

7) Sometimes your customer ends up giving you confidential information at a personal level …avoid encashing it in private or public to show off your sales skills.

8) Not every customer is as smart as you, help them to know their benefits before their manager does it.

There might be more tips on the topic and not all tips are suitable for every customer, but these are very basic tips which I followed, and most of the time I heard from the customers “It’s always a pleasure dealing with you”

18 May Be Experimental, Don’t Hesitate

Be Experimental, Don’t Hesitate

As a part of my “Experiencing The Youth Intelligence ” initiative, I always participate in the interview processes of young talent.

Over the period of last two decades, the drastic change I am observing is that, though this generation talks a lot about taking challenges in life, they are very scared of doing experiments in their career (professional or academic) and facing unpredictable situations …which in a corporate world is called as “out of box thinking “…experimenting with the life. Let it be jumping in a river instead of a swimming pool or let it be selecting an education stream, which is not well known but of your own interest, or getting into a job profile that is totally new…everywhere there is a ” law” being followed to select options and that is being understood as “success”. I also hold parents responsible to some extent, for grooming their kids with such “stigmas”. As a young student or professional, on the path of leadership, it is very important to keep experimenting with life. I was always taught by my bosses ..” if you want different results , you must try different ways”

A young, enthusiastic student, must start thinking at a very early age about this aspect of Leadership and keep experimenting.

Leaders always finds new ways of managing their business or life, by experimenting and that surely keeps the environment & results dynamic.

18 May Train To Perform : TOP

Train To Perform

Post-Pandemic, most organizations are cutting Training Costs either completely or partially and this is going to be “More” dangerous. When we use the word “more”, it’s a relative comparison with the past …as in the past also many organizations, were not giving adequate importance to the training.

While discussing with around 20 CEOs in the industry, they reviled an interesting fact that as a leader of the business they are keen to get their team trained on various topics and skills, but when it comes to the actual effectiveness of the training, the average rating given by most of them was 3, on the scale of 1 to 10 , 10 being the highest. This is not shocking, as because of this, most of the time, in any crucial situation, the first cost every company cuts, is Training & Development cost …as the Tangible, results are not seen.

When the same topic was discussed with HR leads, most of them confirmed that “they arrange all those trainings, which management approves “and only 20% agreed that they even track the “Effectiveness”.

When the same topic was discussed with the Trainers, they gave similar feedback “generally there is no demand on effectiveness monitoring/support and most discussions are happening around man day rate” and “Only 15% of companies found to be demanding effectiveness monitoring/support”

We cannot blame anybody, as everybody has their own priority and the environment has been created like that for donkeys of years.

We at Catalydd are coming up soon with the Training Division, where performance monitoring will be an integral part of Training. We will take up only those assignments where we will be able to demonstrate the effectiveness of the training. Coming up soon with more details

Catalydd Engineering & Consulting