Your organization is in chaos. You want to create pockets of stability. What do you do?
Make the results of meetings predictable.
Winfrey is the manager of a geographically dispersed software development team at the XYZ Corp. Ellsworth, her manager, assigns Winfrey the management responsibility of hosting a biweekly training conference call. The objective is to keep Winfrey’s team up to date on the latest technology.
This type of training is traditionally an erratic, one-way affair at XYZ. A conference call and web cast are set up. Participation is designated as mandatory Participants have no say about the topic and receive short notice of a session, often less than 24 hours. No participant is given an opportunity to review the content. An outside speaker, invariably from HQ, delivers the presentation. Whether there is a Q&A period depends on the skills of the speaker.
Sound like a recipe for failure? Not always. And that’s the biggest problem. Sometimes the sessions are terrific. And sometimes they are worthless. It’s usually a different speaker each time so there is no way to predict the value of a session.
I’ve been in similar situations. I have had managers who would encourage me to attend, regardless of whether my return on time invested could be predicted. My objection to that concept is still echoing in my head. One of my managers continually tried to coax my attendance by saying, “How will you know unless you attend?”. #$@%
Winfrey recognized the problems at XYZ. She made participation optional rather than mandatory. She made a commitment to the team that they would receive a minimum of one week notice before a session. She also committed to sending out a reminder 24 hours before each session. She and at least one member of her team reviewed the training presentation two weeks in advance. She talked with the speaker and highlighted key material and asked that irrelevant material be deleted. She made it clear to the speaker he or she had 45 minutes for the presentation and that there would be a 15 minute Q&A period.
Winfrey didn’t stop there. She also committed to her team that each session would start on time and finish either early or on time. She made the duration of the meeting 75 minutes and used the last 10 – 15 minutes to gather feedback from the team about what went well and what didn’t. She also solicited what the team would like to hear about in the future. She published minutes of the meeting that contained the presentation, and her notes about Q&A and feedback.
And, most importantly, Winfrey made changes based on the feedback.
Yes, there were occasionally still bad sessions. But, they were the exceptions. And the participant feedback made the value of each session clear. The participants saw that their opinion mattered and that their feedback predictably influenced the design of future sessions.
Make the results of your training session or any other meeting predictable. Each bit of predictability reduces chaos.
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