Dear People Heroes,
Do you ever feel trapped by your calendar?
In large organizations, calendars tend to get filled up pretty fast. Everyone wants to hold meetings.
It actually makes sense: the larger the company, the more risk-averse and the more management layers which decisions have to go through.
So you have a lot of meetings. What’s the problem with that?
Problems
Urgent > important
Flashback to my days in a large corporation.
Monday morning, 9am. I get to my desk with black coffee in my right hand. My first reflex is to open my calendar in order to organize my week ahead.
Does this sound familiar? If so, you’re in trouble.
This means that your work is organized based on the meetings that are scheduled.
Should it not be the other way around ?
What’s important for your company should be your priority.
Responsibility gaps
Throughout my career, I’ve learned the hard way that when everyone is responsible, no one is responsible.
This is what happens when you hold too many meetings on a particular topic:
- You develop the idea of shared responsibility — which is tricky.
- You quickly end up in a situation where each individual feels like everyone else will do the work, or even worse, will take the blame for a work that’s poorly done.
Tips
Space out your meetings
In Reinventing Organizations, Frederic Laloux takes the example of Buurtzorg, a dutch home care organization that has embraced self-management:
“ […] they decided to come together just four times a year, with an open agenda to discuss any topics that emerge. This rhythm, they found, is infrequent enough to prevent the risk of them taking the reins from the teams in the way an executive team would.”
Companies like Buurtzorg have voluntarily chosen to space out meetings, to let people find solutions to their problems on their own.
This should already clear 1–2 hours of your daily schedule to allow for urgent meetings to take place.
Unbundle large tasks
It’s difficult for people to take ownership of large tasks. This is why I like to split them into smaller tasks and make each individual owner of one.
This method increased motivation, work quality and focus throughout my teams. I could also clearly feel that the additional ownership built a solid ground for each of my direct reports to evaluate their performance. This was the foundation for a culture of self-improvement.
Have a great day,
Eric Abensur
