Before we get to our 5 Second Leadership lesson, you need to watch Father Guido Sarducci’s Five Minute University.
Our 5 Second Leadership lesson to complement this is:
Set and achieve measurable objectives. Care for your employees and customers.
Do you ever wonder why, if you write it down, you tend to learn something better? There’s some biology behind it. (Today’s science lesson is brought to you by the letter B.)
When you write something down, it stimulates a bunch of cells called the Reticular Activating System (RAS) that exist at the base of your brain. The RAS filters all the stuff that is going on at the time in your brain and gives more importance to the things you’re actively focussing on at that moment. Writing something down brings that information to the forefront of your brain, making it more likely that you’ll remember it.
This doesn’t work though for typing as when you write using your hand, you activate more of your brain and are thus able to remember better.
As to leadership, let me pose a question. Is there anything you have learned about being a leader that you have actually written down?
I think I’ve finally figured out why we hate meetings so much and how we got here. Let’s go back to the industrial economy for a second. Leadership in the industrial economy was pretty simple. You looked after process and the process got you results. Life was pretty unambiguous, process was known and clear and life was simple. As a result you didn’t need a lot of meetings and the ones you did need were probably pretty well defined.
Fast forward to the knowledge economy and things aren’t so simple. Software has taken away a lot of our process work and left us having to face new challenges at a steadily increasing rate. Without process responsibilities, our work is now about getting results and those results are often hard to measure and poorly defined. There is a radical increase in ambiguity.
So take a problem to solve that requires a meeting. You’re already stressed from having too much to do. There isn’t a process in place or the process would have run its course and solved the problem. It isn’t clear what results are required or who has responsibility.
The net effect is discomfort. We don’t like ambiguity, lack of clarity, unmeasurable results, unclear lines of control and yet all of that is what today’s meetings are about. We don’t hate meetings because they are meetings. We hate what we’re trying to do in those meetings: resolve multiple simultaneous ambiguities.
I hadn’t intended on focussing on meetings this week but I got two replies to Monday’s post and thought I should at least weight in with some useless research on meetings. I found an article in the Telegraph that says it all.
“Meetings make people stupid because they impair their ability to think for themselves, scientists have found.
“The performance of people in IQ tests after meetings is significantly lower than if they are left on their own, with women more likely to perform worse than men.
“Researchers at the Virginia Tech Crilion Research institute in the US said people’s performance dropped when they were judged against their peers.”
So it’s conclusive. Meetings aren’t stupid, only those who attend.
It struck me coming out of several meetings in the last few days that we usually seem to book meetings for an hour. Why is that?
Why do meetings seem to take an hour, no matter what the issue is? Surely there are some things that can be dealt with in a shorter time and some that can take longer.
Why do we need multiple meetings on the same subject? Can’t we accomplish the meeting’s objectives in one meeting?
Why also do we need multiple meetings with the same people over the course of a week or a month? Can’t we get organized enough to cover those peoples’ needs all at one time?
Are meetings expanding to fill the time available?
Are we just holding meetings because it is easier than picking up the phone or writing an email?
Are we holding them because it makes us feel important, needed, engaged?
If we hate meetings so much then why?
What causes conflict? Interesting question if you think back to those situations, particularly at work where conflicts happen so often (even if they are swept under the rug and ignored.)
When you get right down to it, conflict comes from a clash of values. You like results and efficiency and the other person values relationships. Conflict is bound to occur and emotions are created by those conflicts.
As a leader though, to resolve that conflict you’re supposed to be empathetic. It is hard to do that when you just can’t appreciate the other person’s values.
How can you resolve the conflict without empathy?
How can you empathize when you can’t relate to their values?
Some days there are more questions than answers.