Is that meeting really necessary?

Several years ago I worked with an organisation who called their UK sales reps into a meeting every Monday morning to report on the previous week.  There were at least 30 and each one had to contribute.  They were allowed to take their laptops into the meeting so the practice was for each rep to continue working whilst waiting for their turn to speak.  Effectively no-one except the Sales Director was actually listening to each presentation.  Add up the cost of all these salaries, the travel costs and the cost of lost time potentially speaking with customers and this was an extremely expensive exercise.

Of course, things have changed now – the pandemic has probably been responsible for the explosion in on-line meetings which of course are less time consuming and require less travel.  Commendable for all sorts of reasons.  So why is it I still hear of people switching off the camera, carrying on with emails, eating their breakfast and, in one case, going to take a bath while the meeting is in progress?

Regular meetings usually lose their flavour after a while and become a chore.  I’ve even heard people say ‘Crikey we’ve got XYZ meeting coming up – what are we going to talk about?’  What a complete waste of everyone’s time!

Making Meetings Valuable

The best way to evaluate your proposed meeting is to use the Alignment model as follows –

Purpose

What is this meeting for? What do you want people to DO as a result?  If it is just information dumping then send them a report, a spec, product release notes or something else – don’t waste their time in a meeting with all the associated costs.

Identity/Role

Who needs to be there and what role are they playing – facilitator, action taker, expert, learner, explorer.  If people don’t have a role to play don’t invite them – they will thank you for it!  Equally if you get invited to a meeting where you have no perceived role then have the courage to ask if its necessary for you to be there and what role you will be expected to play.

Values/Beliefs

Is this meeting important and, if so, what is important about it and to whom?  What do you believe about the outcomes?  Are they positive beliefs or negative?  If negative can you reframe them into something positive and look for the possibilities so that you don’t arrive at the meeting as a ‘naysayer’?

Capability

If the stated outcomes for the meeting are agreed upon do you and the organisation have the capability to carry them through?  If not what’s missing and how are you going to fill the gap?  Do you have the resources to do so?

Behaviour

If you achieve this outcome what behavioural changes would you expect to see in the organisation or team?  Are these acceptable and do they add value to the organisation?

Environment

How would achieving this outcome impacted not only your immediate environment,  but that of the team, the organisation and even possibly the community?

Taking these few simple steps before setting up a meeting will help you to –

• Stay focused
• Maintain employee engagement
• Cut costs
• Achieve outcomes
• Free up time

Happy meeting!

> > DOWNLOAD A FREE PDF OF THE Q1 MEETINGS ALIGNMENT MODEL < <

Pat Hutchinson, Quadrant 1 International Ltd  pat@quadrant1.com

PS – When you try this approach, please do write to me and let me know of your successes!  I look forward to hearing from you.

12 principles of effective training

As a trainer of, amongst other things, presentation skills I came across my notes from when I first attended NLP Trainer Training with Realisation at Stenhouse back in the day and found these principles which are oh so relevant still today ……

Click the image to view a larger version and download

1. The flipchart/Powerpoint is NOT the training (John Rogers)
2. There are no difficult groups only inflexible trainers
3. Excellent training comes from CAUSE not Effect
4. Feedback feeds learning
5. Every response is a training opportunity
6. You reap what you Say – If you always do what you’ve always done …. the delegates will fall asleep!
7. Trainers with high Flexibility will reach parts that other trainers don’t even know about
8. Learning to trust your own resources is the most powerful learning of all
9. The trainers choice: whether you believe something is possible or not you are right
10. Inside every delegate there is a real person
11. The key to training is NOT in your head
12. Everybody has something to learn. Everybody has something to teach

Unconsciously I have stuck with these principles during the 20+ years I have been training leaders and managers – they have served me well – thanks Realisation at Stenhouse!

Are you interested in how we can help with developing these and other presentation and communication skills for yourself or your team? Check out our Advanced Presentation Skills wi th NLP course, or please get in touch at pat@quadrant1.com or on 07768 922244

Employee engagement is a personal matter for each individual.

Engaged employees who wholeheartedly give discretionary effort help the organisation succeed.

While employee engagement is now afforded greater focus, energy and resources by most organisations, traditional employee engagement surveys only measure group engagement issues, ignore the individual data that is crucial to engagement, and assumes only their managers are responsible for engagement.

To significantly increase employee engagement you need to understand the passions, motivations, and expectations of the individual, and use an approach which is based around engagement being a shared responsibility between the employee and the organisation.

Using objective data, we can map individual employee’s passions, motivations, expectations and the degree to which their expectations are perceived to be already being fulfilled, against eight essential Engagement metrics:

• Development • Remuneration • Authority • Social

• Appreciation • Communications • Personal • Work Life Balance

View of top 21 employees alphabetically sorted from a group of 81 employees in total

What does this tell us?

The graph above provides a clear picture of this group of individuals; overall fulfilment scores are predominantly high. This indicates that the majority of these employees feel that the employee expectations which are important to them as individuals are mostly being met.

Do Darvin and Esmerelda appear engaged in their day to day role? Their scores would indicate otherwise, and this will probably be apparent in some way in their behaviours and productivity levels.

Why may Darvin feel like his opinions are not being valued? What may be behind Esmerelda’s apparent lack of fulfilment in her advancement and desire to lead?

Amanda, Antoine and Britt look like it wouldn’t take much for their engagement levels to drop either, and there are some areas where various individuals have rated factors as very important (10’s) which are not being fulfilled and could cause some issues.

The key is to find out what is behind the data

Each of these people – and everyone else in the group – could all benefit from a positive 1-2-1 discussion with their manager to firstly to explore may be behind these scores and to see why they feel their individual expectations are not being fulfilled, and what could be done by their manager, the organisation and they themselves to improve this, and their engagement in their role.

We can also see from the number of high scores afforded across the first 5 expectations – the desire for Development, Advancement, a Capable Leader, To Lead, and to have Opinions Valued, that these seem to be the most often identified as being important to the majority, whereas Quick Pay Increases and Personal Help do not appear to be deemed as important to the individuals in the group.

Room for improvement

The yellow and red areas indicate those expectations that are not necessarily being fulfilled, and can provide a great basis for 2-way conversation firstly to explore may be behind these scores and then to discuss how both parties can improve the situation and benefit from greater engagement. There may be some personal circumstances which are influencing the scores. There could be some simple local solutions in the team which could be implemented, and individual’s feedback could also be useful in feeding into developing wider organisational plans and strategies.

This granular level of in-depth engagement analytics can develop your leaders’ capability to engage their teams and retain top talent. Being able to see how individuals’ values align with your organisation’s business objectives and goals can promote open and engaging discussions and make performance reviews comfortable and productive for everybody.

• Understand individual employee’s expectations and the degree to which there are met.
• Provide effective engagement intervention for each individual employee by targeting the factors that are important to each employee.
• Place employees in roles that are engaging.
• Identify how the organisation can help fulfil the employee’s expectations as well as what the employee needs to do.

Understand engagement and fulfilment levels across the business

As well as individual data, an Organisational view enables you to understand collective engagement and fulfilment levels across the business.

View of employee engagement expectations data from a group of 81 employees in total

Again, we can see clearly that whereas the overall fulfilment of the group of 81 employees is around 2/3rds satisfied, there remains 1 third of expectations unmet.

We can also see that ‘Wants Development’ is the highest placed expectation, and ‘Wants Opinions Valued’ is the most unmet of them all. The grey areas show where those expectations have not been ranked highly, and indicates that flexible work time, quick pay increases and personal help are of little value to this group of individuals.

Explore your data in many different ways

Interactive dashboards allow you to select groups to analyse by department, team, or manager using customisable tags and easily generate reports. A traffic light colour scheme easily identifies any hot spot areas to focus on.

Using advanced organisational analytics such as these for PEOPLE means you can measure, identify, develop, and improve across individuals, groups, teams, business areas and behaviours using global and individual data to support people plans, drive action, and to create a culture of engagement and high performance.

Visualise your Group Data

This is a snapshot of the high-level Organisational Analytics data available just across Employee Engagement Expectations. You can also get data for your people and your organisation on:

• Senior and emerging leadership competency
• Culture of your organisation
• Collaboration and Team competencies
• Team Dynamics
• Emotional Intelligence competencies
• Remote Working competencies

How helpful would this data be for informing your people development plans, culture and engagement programmes and succession plans?

You can find out more about Organisational Analytics here. leaders skills and competencies

If you would like to discuss how Organisational Analytics can help support your business objectives and people plans please contact Pat Hutchinson: pat@quadrant1.com or on 07768 922244

Where do your leaders need most support?

A common thread often found in organisations is where managers and leaders have been promoted after demonstrating skill and success in operational roles. Unfortunately, many then appear to struggle to get to grips with the new role, and seem to lack some of the necessary skills and competencies required to make the step to becoming a successful leader for their teams.

The behaviours and resulting ramifications can often be seen and felt in the day to day workplace. Despite this, it can be difficult to pinpoint where to focus to help these people to develop more effective behaviours and strategies to improve these skills and bring better success in their role.

What could that focus look like?

This is a group overview of 40 managers, who have been objectively measured against 10 Leadership competencies.

If you were to look at the 9 areas of leadership competency in the graph below… which areas in particular would you say need some focus?

If you just look at the red areas then ‘Impact and Influence‘, ‘Leading People‘ and ‘Communication‘, in the first instance, perhaps? And then maybe ‘Achievement Orientation‘ and ‘Resilience and Perseverance‘. There doesn’t really seem to be any issues with ‘Problem Solving‘ skills or ‘Learning Agility‘. There’s a lot that could be improved across the amber areas as well to bring those skills up.

What could that look like and feel like in this organisation?

Perhaps a group of managers who are great at resolving issues, fighting fires, and taking learnings from experiences, success and mistakes and applying it to new situations.

However, perhaps some of them may not be so great at taking the lead in achieving the company’s mission and objectives, influencing and engaging their teams to contribute towards the company’s goals or communicating effectively with their teams to let them know what is expected of them.

Maybe a group of managers where some may have been promoted because they are good at their job – but haven’t yet been able to develop the leadership skills they need in their more strategic and influencing role.

And so if you look at the individual list view of those 40 managers below, who would you say could really benefit from some development and support to be able to better succeed in their role? 

Clearly, everyone can always benefit from development and support. In this case, it would probably be helpful to get a better understanding of what is going on with Tuan Nyugen. And it would be worth looking at what additional development would be helpful for Adela Olga, Annalisa Elba, Shelby May and Minerva Dixon to improve their leadership skills.

It’s also quite easy to see who could make up a cohort for some skills development around ‘Impact and Influence‘ (last column), or Communications skills (2nd to last column).

And maybe it is apparent which managers could be considered for a benchmarking success exercise to support succession planning and recruitment plans. leaders skills and competencies

Visualise your Group Data

This is just a snapshot of the high-level Organisational Analytics data available just across these 10 Leadership competencies. You can also get data for your people and your organisation on:

• Culture of your organisation
• Individual’s alignment with your organisation’s core values
• Individual and collective engagement factors and fulfilment levels of those engagement factors
• Collaboration and Team competencies
• Team Dynamics
• Emotional Intelligence competencies
• Remote Working competencies

How helpful would this data be for informing your people development plans, culture and engagement programmes and succession plans?

You can find out more about Organisational Analytics here. leaders skills and competencies

If you would like to discuss how Organisational Analytics can help support your business objectives and people plans please contact Pat Hutchinson: pat@quadrant1.com or on 07768 922244

All Procedure should increase choice – the ultimate paradox!

Life is a paradox! Nothing is ever absolute as Yin Yang tells us. Flexibility is the name of the game and those who demonstrate it are generally more able to succeed in the world. Living by rules alone creates barriers and structures and limited thinking. Rules are often maintained long after they are obsolete. Living with constant choice, on the other hand, can create chaos for those involved not knowing what is likely to happen next and often paralysed into inaction because of it.

In an ideal world ‘All Procedure Should Increase Choice’. In other words the rules are there to create a platform of understanding from which to launch new, creative ideas. Take the rules of the road for example – without them chaos would reign and travelling from A to B or even C, D or E would become chaotic and traumatic.

Are your rules helping or hindering?

So next time you have a minute take a note of the rules (written and unwritten) that you abide by within your working environment. Are they helping or hindering creativity and progress. Equally are there some areas where rules might give people the confidence to break out of their comfort zones and make progress? Food for thought. Enjoy!

If you would like to know more about paradoxical success please get in touch with us

07768 92224 or  pat@quadrant1.com