As a member of various boards and committees in my community and industry I attend scores of meetings each year. And I can count on one hand the number of those meetings that are well conducted!
Meeting chairs and organizational officers don't control the meeting, they simply follow the strongest personality in the group. If someone persuasive wants to abuse the meeting's time frame or get off track onto subjects not relevant to this meeting, they let them.
One of my colleagues said the other day, "Joe (not his real name)sure runs a long meeting. I don't attend very often because so much of the time is wasted."
Now notice that he didn't say that to "Joe", he said it to me, a fellow member. I wonder how many people are saying similar things about you and me?
A meeting represents a huge investment of time, attention and talent. Every person in that room could be doing something else and probably earning money for it. All of them have other priorities in life. All of them have shown the leader the courtesy of showing up and doing nothing else during this time. The LEAST the leader could do is run a tight meeting!
Another area of leadership weakness is organizing projects. Plenty of people are willing to step up and get things started but not as many are skilled at making them happen. I remember when I was in the Jaycees many years ago, we were all required to learn a project planning process. We used a tool called "The Chairman's Planning Guide." It was a simple outline for organizing. It consisted of defining the primary purpose of the project, showing how it fits in with other priorities, setting specific goals, etc. It was such a good tool that I had my son memorize like a poem and recite it often. He was under ten years old at the time, but he still remembers the "7 Step Planning Process" today, in his thirties. And he has used it to accomplish goals. These "steps" are pretty much universal and all planning processes cover them, but we need more people to know and use them...daily.
A third area of leadership lack is motivating volunteers. Anyone can motivate another person when the motive is a paycheck or avoiding pain, but not so many are good at getting people to voluntarily commit to a goal. This involves accessing the part of a person that is totally under their control, something known as "discretionary effort." That is where the true value of one's involvement shows most. When they are giving it their full commitment instead of mere token effort.
These skills for: Running Meetings, Organizing Projects and Motivating Volunteers are not difficult to learn. But to learn them, we must do two things; Teach them well and Require their use. We must require those who lead our meetings to get better at it. We must speak up and demand that projects be organized and followed through to closure. We must teach each other how to discern the truth about what works and what doesn't in motivating us.
Only when MOST organizations start requiring their leaders to be effective at leading will we get better results and at the same time produce a new crop of good leaders each year.
Effective leadership is not about being in charge. It is about getting the job done well.
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3 comments:
Great points Jim. I would say another thing lacking is the ability to execute. Many leaders know how to talk the talk, but few want to take the tough actions and really make it happen. Would you mind sharing your thoughts on that?
Phil has said,"another thing lacking is the ability to execute. Many leaders know how to talk the talk, but few want to take the tough actions and really make it happen. Would you mind sharing your thoughts on that?"
Yes, I do have some thoughts on that. It seems less a lack of ability than a lack of willingness. They just aren't willing to force themselves to do the unpleasant work.
This problem has been eternal. Earl Nightingale used to speak of those who were motivated more by pleasing experiences than by pleasing outcomes. The majority of people, by definition, not the leaders, are talkers more than doers.
Getting a job done, the actual execution of the results is something that requires courage. One definition of courage is: taking action despite your fears.
Another is: The ability to get yourself to do what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, whether you feel like it or not, and still doing it well.
Regardless which of these definitions you prefer, the key element in executing on an intention or a need is having the courage to face the criticism, disagreement, judgement, disapproval, resistance, and anger of others. Another aspect is the endurance of pain, drudgery or boredom in the process of executing a plan.
I'll write later about where courage comes from. For now, let's all start looking for ways to en-courage each other. Most encouragement ends up being mere reassurance. I think we need to go deeper and truly build each other's courage.
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