It's Monday - make those meetings work better!

In a few hours, you will be starting your weekly round of 'good-finding', solution-focused, appreciative meetings; you will programme some quiet time for reflection and planning and look forward to recognising the contributions of others towards your success. Your meetings will run well, crisply chaired with collaborative outcomes (well, I hope so anyway). 

On the other hand, your week might pan out a little differently. In one sample of 65 CEOs reported by the Wall Street Journal and cited by the Drucker Exchange, executives spent roughly 18 hours of a 55-hour workweek in meetings, more than three hours on calls and five hours in business meals (!), on average, the Journal noted. “Working alone averaged just six hours weekly.”  

The Drucker Exchange website also reported that he found meetings to be big potential time-wasters. He also knew that they didn’t have to be that way. The key to successful meetings, in Drucker’s eyes, was to make sure that they became “work sessions rather than bull sessions.”

In The Effective Executive, Drucker put meetings into the following categories, and also offered some specific operating instructions for each:

1. “A meeting to prepare a statement, an announcement, or a press release. For this to be productive, one member has to prepare a draft beforehand.” So, no statements created by committee, at least not from scratch. 
2. “A meeting to make an announcement—for example, an organisational change. This meeting should be confined to the announcement and a discussion about it.” Limiting the scope to ensure the message is clear and can be properly conveyed outside of the meeting need not limit the necessary debate and consultation, rather it ensures they happen with the key message crystal clear.  
3. “A meeting in which one member reports. Nothing but the report should be discussed.” We know what happens when these single-issue meetings broaden out to include "just another issue", don't we? 
4. “A meeting in which several or all members report. Either there should be no discussion at all or the discussion should be limited to questions for clarification.” That's a tough one. yet, how often have these sessions burned hours of time unnecessarily, particularly if clarification becomes debate which turns into arguments of position-taking?  
5.  “A meeting to inform the convening executive. The executive should listen and ask questions.”
6.  “A meeting whose only function is to allow the participants to be in the executive’s presence. . . . .There is no way to make these meetings productive. They are the penalties of rank.”

From there, good executives “sum up and adjourn”—and then they follow up. Alfred Sloan of General Motors always wrote up a summary of the main points and the conclusions reached at a meeting and sent a copy to everyone who’d been present. Said Drucker: “It was through these memos—each a small masterpiece—that Sloan made himself into an outstandingly effective executive.”

Some of the items in the list might appear to be rather strict, dogmatic even - perhaps they were intended that way, to challenge current practice and generate a shift of behaviour. Whether dogmatic or simply properly challenging, Drucker's views are food for thought at a time when we so many colleagues have so much to do with so little resource - the most precious of which is time!

Have an achieving week.

North-South divide - or is it more complex than that?

This Guardian report http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/feb/10/essex-jaywick-youth-unemployment-hotspot is a thoughtful and thought-provoking piece about the growing problem of unemployment for young people. The 'twist' in this story, if there is one, is the location of this, the Country's youth-unemployment 'high-spot', in percentage terms at least. It's not in the north of England or in the inner part of one of our core cities. No, it's in an area of Clacton-on-Sea in Essex. To a degree though, the location is immaterial. Stories like this can be as common in rural market towns as they are in larger population centres.


The article concentrates in an understated way on the experience of being workless and not in education, having little focus for each day, being geographically, economically and socially isolated, and so on. The article also touches on the long-term effects youth unemployment between 16-24 has on the level of wages young people can expect to receive later in life. The impact is far from negligible, so even when employment can be secured, the rewards can be lower across many years. 


This dreadful waste of talent and energy when allied to, or as a consequence of, the rapid and incoherent scrapping of essential public/vol/com programmes and projects, will take a generation to address. It seems though that this is not the generation in which that will take place in a concerted and consistent manner. 


I cannot be alone in spotting yet another apparent attention-diversion to this real and deep problem in society, when today the Coalition announced that bonuses in the public sector are to be thoroughly investigated. I have little time for bonuses being paid to public servants, but evidence suggests that in a number of cases, mainly in the civil service and not local government for instance, they were instigated to make up for low pay rises and to avoid long-term costs being consolidated into salaries and thus pension entitlements. Those agreements, we can be sure, will be an inconvenient truth during this investigation. As inconvenient a truth as the bonuses paid to bankers in the publicly owned banks - or maybe this is the Trojan horse to finally nail the bonuses of those 'public servants'!   

12 Resolutions that might actually make a difference

How have your New Year's Resolutions fared? Well, I hope. I saved this piece from New Year specifically to replay it a little further into the year when the hype has died down, the first credit bill has been faced and the more dramatic of our resolutions have bitten the dust, to be replaced with that hard-edged reality that February always seems to bring. Check out this link. Whilst a couple of items are more geared towards the USA, the sense remains. All of them offer something of value, positive challenge or potential personal achievement. Happy New Year!  


http://www.thoughtleadersllc.com/2012/01/12-new-years-resolutions-for-a-less-idiotic-world/

Lester & Alexander - cock-up and now conspiracy?

As a senior level interim I have become transfixed by the 'car crash' that is the Lester case. The Municipal Journal has reported:

"Senior local government officials face a potential Treasury probe into their personal tax affairs following revelations that the head of the Student Loans Company (SLC) avoided paying tax on his salary, under arrangements agreed within Whitehall.

Ed Lester was not added to the SLC payroll when given a two-year contract in January 2011, and was paid through a private firm - a loophole which saved him an estimated £40,000 a year on his tax bill.

His £182,000 pay package will now be taxed 'at source' meaning tax and National Insurance will in future be deducted, ministers say.

The discovery of Mr Lester's payment methods, following a BBC Newsnight and Exaro News investigation, has prompted the chief secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander, to launch an investigation into senior public sector employees' pay." 

This is particularly interesting on a number of levels. First, because of course it was Danny Alexander himself who signed-off the terms of the Lester agreement. Could it be that Alexander is launching an inquiry (not into engaging interims in Whitehall it seems, but 'senior public sector employees' pay' - interims are by their very status private sector providers!!) because it's a way of diverting attention from his specific role in one case? 

Second, why should 'public sector employees' pay' be investigated when Lester was an interim and then a permanent official on a fixed-term contract? Any investigation needs to satisfy itself of the probity when engaging interims of course, but why investigate public sector employees' pay? Is this a fishing expedition? If so perhaps,perversely, we ought to welcome it. If he investigates properly, he'll find a small three figure number of senior LG employees earning over £100,000 a year and 10,000 employees in the NHS earning over that sum (watch Lansley step in when that happens).

Third, it might have been a quite legitimate arrangement to save the government department that procured him from certain costs when engaged as an interim, but Lester, like most interims, should have been quite aware of the shift in his engagement status when he moved into the fixed term role - and so would his client/employer. So this case needs to be properly understood because the SLC might have been saving their Government department money through the original arrangement, as well as Lester, but at the same time avoiding providing HMRC with its due, i.e. it's as much SLC's fault as Lester's (not that I have a great deal of sympathy for the latter).

The MJ goes on to report, "A Treasury spokesperson told The MJ: 'We have not worked out the precise scope of the investigation. That decision is ongoing. We need to consider what extent this could cover local government.

'We are considering the issue of whether there is anything we can do in relation to local government, but we don't have the same remit there. We can't dictate to them in the same way we can central government.

'There will be natural limits to what we do in regards local government but that does not mean we can’t consider what we can do.'

So, scope creep? Opportunistically, it might be claimed,  the government that allowed Lester to operate as an interim when actually an official try to expand the matter to fold in local government. (Has Eric 'neutron' Pickles muscled in here, e.g. "Hi Danny, Eric here. Listen youth, why don't we have a poke around in LG on the back-of this Lester case?). 


Transparency of relationship when public services engage external support is essential, yet in this case I get a sense that Government is attempting to find a way to demonise the public sector again, whilst yet again failing to 'investigate' and act on the preposterous salaries and bonuses paid to barely competent senior figures in banks owned by the nation, i.e. public sector employees. 

In conclusion, the MJ tells us, "Mr Alexander, who signs off all civil service salaries above £142,500, told the Commons yesterday, he was 'not aware…of any tax benefit to the individual [Mr Lester] concerned’ when approving the salary level, which he claimed he had 'reduced significantly'. 

I think Alexander's senior civil servant could be investigated for not having briefed his SoS properly. The tax benefits to all parties should have been obvious. Maybe the benefits were accepted as being to the SLC's benefit as well as Lester's and they decided to 'sod the HMRC' and its share - figuratively speaking, of course!