Meetings

http://www.cmdr-scott.blogspot.com/

BEYOND BASEBALL
Most big organizations outside baseball aren't as focused on results as an organization run by someone like Mike Hargrove. In fact, I'd say the majority of company/workgroup meetings have no clear agenda. This is my estimate of big organizations actual meetings to communicate key objectives, and what I think they should be doing

% Now	Type	Ideal %
55	Group meeting, no actionable take-aways.	5
15	Group meeting, actionable take-aways	70
5	One-on-one, no actionable agenda	15
25	One-on-one, actionable take-aways	10

As a general first try, it pays to communicate actionable information in groups. Everyone gets to hear the same thing and a question that has a useful answer gets shared by the group so you get to delegate explanation and follow-up. Sometimes, that doesn't work, so you have to resort to the Hargrove fall-back method. I'm not suggesting you replace all group meetings with the Hargrove method -- my recommended ratio is pretty small for them. They're valuable, but in a context that shouldn't come up too often if the group meetings have actionable take-aways. The meetings that just need to die die die are the big 100s of people standing around for no apparent purpose while Men in Suits bloviate about their arcana. I actually worked at a place that had one for the editorial staff of a weekly trade magazine where the Publisher, head of sales and editor in chief briefed us on the new executive compensation plan that might make them all very wealthy -- a plan that none of the attendees could profit from. The plan was very exciting for the top echelon of execs in the house, and they just had to share their good fortune. It took them about 20 minutes to realize staff didn't share their thrill at it. They finally realized it only because a woman I'll call Priscilla raised her hand to interrupt the masturbatory self-congratulation with the question, "That's all well and good, but what's in it for me?". After thinking about it for a few seconds, the epiphany crept in. Wild pitch.

One-on-one, no actionable agenda meetings help a manager and report work on less obvious issues, and tend to let both fill in information -- the manager about the reprt's workday and issues that might seem too small to report if the agenda is too prescribed, and the report about the same kind of subtle intentions the manager might have.

Keep Hargrove's method in mind for what it can be massively effective for: focusing people on the specifics when routine methods have failed. Baseball, unforgiving of mediocre management, produces a lot of very skilled practitioners of the management craft, like Mike Hargrove.