Don’t meet, work!

On his blog Remarkable Leadership, Kevin Eikenberry cited an interesting study result in his article “Leadership and Meetings“: Almost no manager expects productivity to drop if meetings got banned for one day a week. About half of them even think productivity would increase!

In the OfficeTeam survey, 150 executives were asked “How would employee productivity be affected if your company banned meetings one day a week?” The results:

• No change: 46% (blue)
• More productive: 45% (green)
• Less productive: 7% (yellow)
• Don’t know: 2% (red)

My subsequent question would be: “So, why do you think those meetings don’t add value, and what are you going to do about it?”

Meetings have the purpose of fostering efficient communication. But just coming together in a room to talk doesn’t cut it. That’s the time, money and drive sink we all dread. As always, you have to do things right to reap the benefits.

Brian lists the most important things you should take care of to stop the waste by ineffective meetings:

• Have clear desired outcomes for every meeting that are communicated before hand.
• Use, and follow an agenda (that is focused on those desired outcomes).
• Hold people accountable for the action items.

So, there are two documents that are crucial for effective meetings: an agenda, sent to everyone in advance, and the meeting minutes (complete with action items and deadlines), sent to everyone after the meeting.

And hey, if you make your meetings really effective, you can have that no-meeting day anyway!

How to get the customer off your back

Customers become a nuisance whenever they develop a tendency to cling. Suddenly, you find yourself spending a lot of time in meetings and phone calls that you’d rather use for working on your tasks. It doesn’t matter if you’re a freelancer working for several companies or if your customers sit in the same company as yourself, you’ll eventually experience the contact-hungry client.

How should you deal with that need? The request “Excuse me, but could you please leave me alone and let me do my work?” doesn’t seem very effective.

Gitte Härter over at unternehmenskick.de gave that situation a second look and switched to another perspective: that of the customer. She found out that often a heightened need of communication comes from insecurity. In detail, she lists the following causes for insecurity in a professional relationship:

• The customer doesn’t yet know you.
• The customer made some bad experiences.
• The customer himself is insecure.
• The customer likes to chat.
• The customer wants to dominate you.
• You invoke the feeling, that you’re insecure or maybe understood something wrong.
• You failed in posing enough of the right questions, maybe even regarding the core issues that you need to understand to deliver the right solution.
• You seem to walk in another (your own?) direction.
• You failed another time in the past.
• You don’t respond promptly to phone calls or emails.
• You’re generally too silent.
• You communicate too vaguely.

Over the years, I learned that customers abhore a communication vacuum. So, if you don’t communicate the customer expects you to, oftentimes they will take the lead and make you communicate. Unfortunately, this will never be as effective as if you established a steady and controled information flow in the first place.

Gitte has the following suggestions on how you can take the lead and position yourself as a professional partner:

1. Create trust. — Be present, pose the right questions, show genuine interest in your counterpart. Get all the information necessary to deliver a good job. Also, dare to give honest feedback; for example, explain the customer if his ideas don’t hit the spot.

2. Make clear that you’ll get in touch when it’s time. — You’ll rid yourself of control calls as soon as your customer can trust that you work on their issue and will get back to them when questions, showstoppers or delays occur. Make sure you do! Send short receipt acknowledgements, deliver status reports or give a perspective on when you’ll follow up.

3. Be the boss in your area. — Your customer gives the order and has the say on goal and conditions, but he isn’t supposed to interfere on your area of expertise. Stand your ground.

4. Lead the conversation. — Never be passive in a conversation. Lead the dialogue, show you’re efficient. Get to the point. Don’t get lost in endless discussions or waste your time in useless chitchat.

5. Summarize what you agreed upon. — Everytime you talked (or emailed) about something, at the end summarize the relevant points and what each will do until when.

6. Acknowledge “good” behaviour. — A customer delivers all information in time and doesn’t question everything? He leaves you especially much freedom? Tell him about your happiness about his behaviour: “Working with you is great: you send everything so quickly and you’re open to my suggestions — thank you!”

7. Always meet deadlines. — Always. Meet them without exception. So make them realistic. If there’s a rare emergency, inform the customer immediately.

So the summary is: Oftentimes, it’s not the customer, it’s you. Drive or be driven.

Communicate to lead

Communication is (finally) one of my most important topics at work. Steve Roesler recommends to “add these four thoughts to your leadership communication kit”, and I can’t emphasize his points enough:

• Never assume that anyone knows anything.
• The larger the group, the more attention needs to be given to communicating.
• When left in the dark, people will fantasize their own reality. Do you want their fantasy to trump your reality?
• Effective leaders are obsessed with accurate, frequent communication.

New german law criticized as start into surveillance state

In an official statement, the german “Gesellschaft für Informatik” (GI), Germany’s biggest association of IT experts, states that the new “BSI law” probably is a progress from the draft of 2008, but still has deeply rooted flaws. (BSI is short for “Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationtechnik”, the federal office for information technology security.)

What troubles the IT experts most is the fact that each and every communication with federal authorities will be completely monitored, which they regard as the first step to a surveillance state. “GI demands free and uncontrolled communication of all citizens with federal authorities as warranted by the constitution”, the paper announces. Personal information won’t be sufficiently secured by the proposed law, so effective restrictions must be put in place, GI concludes.

By criticising the “BSI law”, GI joins other voices that fear an increase in stately surveillance and in the risk of unauthorized access to personal data, for example Peter Schaar, the german federal data privacy commissioner.

I regard it as highly necessary that all parts of german society raise their voices against those attempts at collecting more personal data with neither valid reason nor the technical and legal means of protecting them. Join the protest!

(via Heise Newsticker)

Why Twitter is worth the risk

I’ve been using Twitter for many months now and it became a standard communication tool for me. Not everyone likes the service, though. Many people think of it as a continuous source of worthless distractions. And indeed, it can seriously disrupt your work flow.

Since fellow geek Tom Schimana discovered Twitter himself recently and is asking for help, I’ll write a bit about why I use Twitter despite this risk.

Twitter asks its users: “What are you doing?” and puts a 140 character limit to your answers. Those “tweets” get sent to everyone who subscribed to your Twitter account, either by the Twitter website, via email or over SMS sent to their mobile phone.

You can also mark tweets that are meant for a certain person by starting them with “@username” (an at sign followed by their Twitter name). If you’d like to send them a non-public message, start it with “d username”.

In a way, Twitter is the virtual equivalent to your pub at the corner. You periodically spend some time there and, over time, start conversations and learn to know the other regulars. Sometimes, you even engage in a deeper discussion, but most of the time it’s just smalltalk. Nonetheless, you learn about what people are doing, what happens in the community or in the lives of your friends.

Twitter does the same for you, but you are able to choose the people whose messages you get. It’s your decision who you’d like to “follow”, as Twitter puts it. By posting what you’re doing or thinking, you let people participate in a little bit of your life. Over time, your followers will recognize things they share with you, be it that you are a Mac user or going to be a parent. You can direct people to interesting websites, maybe your own. Pose a question and often you’ll get responses from your followers in a matter of minutes.

On Twitter and its complementary services like TwitterMap, I found a blogger meetup in my home town and gained contact to the local Barcamp scene. I even found new business partners by answering quickly to their requests for support and then switching to IM or email.

Twitter isn’t an Instant Messaging service, though. A publicly held dialogue will soon annoy your other followers and make them think about “unfollowing” you. It’s considered as quite rude as is talking loudly to someone in a pub so that anyone can’t help but overhear you.

So, just give Twitter a try and your network some time to develop. Find interesting people to follow and share interesting or entertaining bits with your followers. As long as you contribute information more valuable than “Going to the loo.”, you’ll build new connections that can in turn be interesting and useful to you.

And don’t forget to click “Follow” on my Twitter page!