A great friend of mine, John Donnelly, always says about team meetings that “You can’t be caught working if you’re in a team meeting” and of course he’s right. It amazes me how many people still flit from one meeting to another, particularly in public services, that actually believe they are doing something! The problem is that when they attend the next meeting to discuss actions from the previous meeting they often haven’t had time to do the work because they’ve been too busy attending meetings!

Three hours a day in internal meetings
According to the figures, almost a quarter of employees spend up to
three hours a day in internal meetings.
Answering emails is another time waster with the average number of internal emails received being 32 – although
nearly one in five say they get up to 50 a day, which works out as one
email every eight-and-a-half minutes.

Internal meetings a colossal waste of time
Management today have an article that suggests that UK businesses waste
£255m a day on internal meetings and emails. And that’s not just on
multi-packs of chocolate Hobnobs: The refreshing thing is that those attending meetings often see them as a
colossal waste of time, that is except those that spend their days in meetings rather than be seen working.

Over the past weeks I’ve been talking to various businesses about the strategies that they are developing for 2012 and beyond and in the light of continued hard times.

The one common factor in my discussions is that there seems to be a great emphasis on sales and sales team restructure to maintain growth. Identifying the successful sales team members isn’t difficult and identifying those that need replacing isn’t difficult either. The problem is that those at the top probably won’t be able to deliver more and those at the bottom are difficult to motivate.

Greatest potential growth
Possibly the greatest potential growth from a sales team will come from the average performers. That is those that are producing between 90% and 125% of their target on a regular basis. This is partly because this group tends to have more people in it than the top or the bottom and motivating them to produce more has the greatest potential for success.

Sales team restructure strategy
When developing strategies for a sales team restructure they should include changing territory, clients, working times, information and support given to the sales team and a good study of the recruitment process and criteria for those joining the team.

This video on sales and marketing interview questions might help

I had to laugh at Management Today’s article on Ryan Air’s plans to replace toilets on their planes with paid seating.

Famous for its cut-throat approach
to cost-cutting the budget airline plans to remove two of its loos and replace them with up to six extra
seats but as MT asks “Is its latest ruse literally taking the piss”. 

Planning meetings:
We can only imagine the suggestions that the management team come up with at cost-cutting planning meetings. Presumably
they’ve considered building on the priority boarding model by charging for in-flight
commodes. this could be a money earner whilst saving passengers having to get up from their seat mid-flight.

It should be noted that there’s no legal stipulation for
an airline to provide toilets on its aircraft. It’s just if you’re supplying loads of beers to stag parties off for the weekend it would seem sensible to keep the seats dry for those coming back on the return journey!
Or will dry seats cost extra in the future?

Maximum seats allowed
As Ryanair proposes to prevent passengers from squeezing one out at one
end, it’s simultaneously doing the squeezing at the other: The airline carries an
estimated 75m passengers per year, and currently flies only Boeing
737-800 and has installed 189 seats on each plane, the maximum
allowed under current rules and it also charges up
to £20 per piece of checked luggage per flight. The Office of Fair Trading is investigating a ‘super-complaint’ by
the Consumers’ Association into such charges by low-cost airlines.

despite the high levels of unemployment many of the businesses that I talk to are finding difficulties in hiring gifted and talented people to join their teams.

This is backed up by the recent research from the CIPD talent planning survey 2011 that found that 52% of businesses are finding it difficult to fill vacant positions with the talent they need to do the job. The CBI suggests that more than half of their members aren’t confident of finding talent to meet their needs.

So what can a business do to find gifted employees?

1. Consider using job boards such as those on LinkedIn and Facebook
2. Consider using on-line groups and forums to say you are seeking talent
3. Ensure that you are looking for the talent that will match the business strategy
4. Consider internal candidates
5. Consider if the job, benefits and profile of your business will attract the very best and if not then restructure the position so that it will be attractive to the talent you are looking for
6. Calculate your talent needs for the present, medium and long-term and create strategies to deliver these
7. Don’t be too rigid in recruiting the “very best”. The perfect employee doesn’t exist. But make sure you capture the “best available” before your competitors.

It’s not often that I blog twice in one day but I’ve been motivated by two pieces of news today. The first came from the BBC who predict that 1 in 4 children will grow up in poverty within the next ten years. The second piece of doom and gloom news was reported in Management Today that said “More doom and Gloom as BCC cuts UK growth forecast”.

The end of the world is nigh!
The world seems to be talking itself closer to the precipice faster than the village idiot saying that the end of the world is nigh! Quite frankly I’m tired of listening to doom and gloom merchants. Now I understand that good news doesn’t sell newspapers or advertising space on TV but can’t we have some success reported. There’s so much out there!

Successes
Such as the hugely successful and multiple award winning Riverbanks Clinic. Only recently established but already one of the UK’s leading Aesthetic Medicine Clinics and run by a brilliant team of dedicated professionals.

That Selfridges was voted the “Best Department Store in the World” at the Global Department Store Summit in New York in 2010

Lebara, the mobile phone company, that won the UK Customer Service award at the Mobile News Awards 2011

there’s so much good news to talk about do you know any other business success?
If so, let’s start to publicise them.

I was not surprised to recently read that graduates aged around 29 feel unappreciated, unrewarded and unless it changes are about to leave the games field (their current employers) and take their ball with them.

As we know generation Y refers to people born between 1985 and 2000 and if one believes the Great Expectations Report published by ILM and Ashridge Business School their expectations of employment aren’t being met.

They had better get used to it
When I told a friend of this his reply was “Well, they had better get used to it. Who’s expectations are being met in this current business climate” and then went on to talk about the “poor products” that come out of universities and business schools that I thought a bit harsh.

However, the research in the report states that 45% of the group believe their salaries are below expectations. 38% think their career opportunities disappointing and that over one third (40%) will be thinking of leaving their current job within twelve months.

Talent pipeline
Whilst this report shouldn’t be a surprise, as far as my experience goes if you ask any group of employees if they are happy a large proportion won’t be and will be looking for employment elsewhere. However, for businesses trying to create a pipeline of talent able to be the managers of the future the thing I would suggest is not to panic. Some turnover is good and if you’re hanging onto the majority of the employees you find most useful through targeted actions then it’s as good as one can hope for.

Then again there was the useful piece of advice from the ILM Chairman Peter Cheese, “How employee groups are managed is integral to holding onto them.”
Now there’s something new!

“What are the top ten questions that a team leader could ask at a team
meeting to generate discussion that will lead to team improvement” a good
friend asked me a few days ago.

I found providing an answer very difficult
because the questions a team needs to consider will depend upon the business
issues at the time, the maturity of the team and other factors. After thinking about it I told him that I
probably had a hundred questions I could ask and he challenged me to email
him one each day for the next one hundred days!

The first two questions have already been sent to him and then I got thinking that I could include the questions as a Tweet to all my followers.

So each day I will Tweet a question that could be asked and discussed at a team meeting. If you don’t want to miss these Tweets then “LIST” me on twitter so that you can have them sent directly into your list

Questions to ask at a team meeting that have been sent so far are:

“How does the team generate and progress new ideas?”

 and

“What level of clarity has the team of the expectations of it?”

It seems that “losing top talent to competitors” is keeping some senior Directors awake at night. In the past few days I’ve been approached by three different companies asking for help to reduce the risk that their top talent might leave the team.

Here are just three of the tips I advise my clients when advising on retaining talent.

1) Ask yourself the reasons why the talent joined your team in the first place. (Was it challenge of the work, learning opportunities, career path, the business looked great on their CV, resume?). Are these reasons still relevant and are they still being delivered?
If not then the talent is at risk of leaving.

2) Ask yourself the value of your “Poach Rate”. The “Poach Rate” is the additional percentage in salary that a competitor would need to offer to steal your talent. The higher the percentage increase in salary the more your talent values working for your team. If the competitor only has to offer an additional 2-5% salary increase then the reason for leaving is more likely to be poor management, poor culture, few learning opportunities etc.

3) Meet and observe your top talent. Not just at appraisal times but regularly.
Listen and look at the way they walk, talk, dress, engage with customers and colleagues at meetings. (I often go into a business and find that I can identify a talent that’s “on the way out” by just looking at how engaged they are. But then I do this as a matter of norm and often I’m not wrong!)
Ignoring talent because you believe it’s happy, or you’re too busy to observe it, tends to increase the risk that it will leave.

Finally it’s worth considering that the day a talented member of your team tells you they are leaving your team is probably six months after they made the decision to do so!

Quite a stir was caused this morning on Twitter when I suggested that Lack of talent is the biggest obstacle to growth but many businesses don’t have tools to find and keep talent in place.

A couple of people suggested that this Tweet was bull**t and that “Tools don’t find and keep talent; you need good managers for that”. A sentiment, by the way, that I wholly agree with! However, good management rarely operates on its own and often needs to use techniques, models, processes and past experience to guide actions and decisions and these I call “Tools”. In fact I would add that utilising tools in this way is a sign of “Good management”. Trying to manage without tools is often identified as “poor management”.

Now I enjoy having my thoughts and articles challenged and contradicted, it’s what makes for good debate and learning and I’ve got used to my “pearls of wisdom” being dismissed by those unable to understand the subtleties of what I’m saying, but I do wish that they would do so using logic and experience. “Bull**t” is so difficult to reply to! 

There are many occasions when I observe teams that are dysfunctional and not producing the results anticipated. So it was a delight to have experienced first hand a team that through great management, understanding of what needed to be done and an ability, of the whole team, to explain to outsiders what was happening.

A Great Team
Not for the first time (Two years ago I dislocated my shoulder) I find myself in complete admiration for the doctors, nurses and assistants in the UK’s National Health Service. Last week my Mother suffered a heart attack and had to be rushed into hospital. For relatives under such circumstances it’s a frightening time for the patient and an anxious time for relatives.

From the motorbike paramedic to arrive first, to the ambulance crew, A&E staff and cardiac recovery team at the Royal Glamorgan Hosptal everyone worked in calm, professional and well rehearsed precision. As a result my Mother is still poorly but out of danger.

Business could profit from studying the technique
Business could profit from taking lessons in the training, management and delivery of the service that our professional medical teams deliver to their customers.
So it’s a Thank You from me