Set Your Meetings Up for Success

 from HBR

There are three types of meetings: transactional (meeting to get things done); relational (meeting to strengthen connections); and adaptive (meeting to address complex or sensitive topics). Here’s how to set each one up for success. Transactional meetings. As the meeting host, it’s your responsibility to ensure everyone can participate—whether they’re in the same room or remote. Cloud-based tools like Google Docs, Miro, and FigJam are game-changers. Because multiple people can edit simultaneously, everyone sees updates in real time, and they far outweigh a whiteboard only a few can see. Relational meetings. Whether you’re convening two people or the whole organization, relational meetings should be intentionally designed. Set clear objectives at the top — for example, to learn about each other’s career goals or formative professional experiences. Structured activities can help grease the conversational wheels. Adaptive meetings. Whether your team is setting strategy, brainstorming, or talking through distressing news events, these meetings depend on psychological safety. Physical comfort is key, too; move the furniture around, loosen up, and emphasize that decision making and execution will come later.

Solicit Feedback from Your Team—Gracefully

 

from HBV

As a manager, it’s not enough to give feedback to your direct reports. It’s also part of your job to solicit feedback from them. Still, it can be awkward to ask your employees to evaluate you. Here’s how to do it gracefully. Start by telling your direct report that you’re not only open to feedback, but that you want it. Explain to them that by giving you feedback, they’ll be helping you meet your goal of improving as a leader. Next, diffuse any fear of retaliation by demonstrating humility and honesty. Try saying something like, “I know that it can feel uncomfortable to give feedback to your boss. I have the same hesitation when my boss asks me for feedback. Let me reassure you that I see your willingness to give me helpful feedback—even if it’s negative—as one of your professional assets.” Demonstrate self-awareness by giving yourself constructive feedback first, which can mitigate their fear of offending you or hurting your feelings. For example, you might say, “Others have shared with me that I can be slow and methodical in my work, often prioritizing accuracy over action.” Finally, tell your direct report what you plan to do with the feedback they give you. Laying out a plan of action will help them trust that you want to implement their input.

Nail this question: tell me about a time you failed

 Nail This Difficult (and Common) Interview Question

“Tell me about a time you failed” is an interview question job seekers dread. How can you be prepared to ace it? Here are some tips.

Focus on learning. What the interviewer ultimately wants (and they may even state this explicitly) is not so much your story of failure but what you learned from it and how you turned that insight into a productive approach.

Choose a miscalculation, not a mistake. Don’t draw attention to your character. When did something external not go as planned? When was a strategy ineffective? When did an approach miss the target?

Look for a we, not a me. A team failing as a group might seem more relatable (and excusable) than an individual failing because there was consensus behind the decision making.

Describe a low-consequence event, and keep it brief. Make sure the stakes of your story are relatively low, not catastrophic, and that you don’t linger on unnecessary details.

Be thoughtful about the words you use—and don’t defend yourself. Use words like learned, gleaned, grew, and overcame. Avoid defensive or regretful language.

Overcome January Doldrums

 For many of us, January and February are often the least-productive and dreariest months of the year. How can you help your team beat the new year doldrums? First, embrace experimentation. Where can you introduce new routines, tools, and habits into your team’s culture? Maybe you replace hour-long meetings with 15-minute, agile-inspired check-ins, or designate a “no-Slack” day of the week. Whatever your team’s experiment is, be sure to commit to it for at least a few weeks. Next, recognize your employees by expressing appreciation or gratitude. You might frame such gestures as a “thank you in advance” for work to come in the new year. Since the holiday season has just passed, your employees probably aren’t expecting this kind of gesture—which is exactly why it could provide the jolt they need right now. Finally, reconnect your team with what matters most, whether that’s your customers, clients, products, or users. Ask your employees to identify how their work will drive the team’s overall mission in the coming year. Taking a moment to reflect as the calendar turns will help your team ground itself in its purpose and meaning.

How can I help?

 Parents, teachers, and managers often intervene by offering either a directive or an evaluation (i.e., judgment), apparently assuming that the only alternative is to stand by silently. But what if they asked simply, "How can I help?" - Alfie Kohn Tweet

Start Meetings with Why

 While you might assume that detailed agendas will improve your meetings, they can lead to a false sense of accomplishment. Instead of spending a lot of time and effort on the process for your meeting, think about what outcomes you want to achieve.

• Start with the why. What’s the specific purpose of this meeting? What do you hope to accomplish?
• Move on to the what. What topics, themes, and information do you need to cover? What questions do you need answered? List them out.
• Consider the who. Once you know why you’re meeting and what you hope to talk about, you can determine who needs to be there—and who doesn’t.
• Don’t overthink the how. Some goals benefit from structured, facilitated conversations. Other times, free-form conversations are sufficient. Don’t be afraid to figure out a structure in real time based on how the conversation naturally flows.
• Beware the when. It’s tempting to put time limits on everything: 10 minutes for the first topic, five minutes for the second, and so on. But it can be difficult to stick to these schedules. Instead of sharing a rigid timeline with the group, estimate how long you think things will take and use that as your own personal guide to move things along.

from Harvard Business Review

Email Process

 I’ve experimented with the following process and want to share it along with a few rules and commonplace tools that help me stay productive, meaningful, and efficient in my email exchanges. The first time you do this, it could take several hours since you may have a lot of clean up to do. But after the initial work, you’ll be able to move quickly. Typically I schedule 30 minutes in the morning, at mid-day, and in the afternoon to do email. Here’s how I use that time:

1. Send: I start my timer and begin by writing emails I had planned to send. This often includes follow-ups to meetings, thank-you notes, questions, and scheduling and other requests. I do this first so that if someone gets back to me immediately I have time to respond while I’m still in my 30-minute email period.

2. Delete: Next, I quickly glance through the “subject” and “from” lines on the emails in my inbox and immediately delete the ones I know I don’t want to waste time reading, including marketing emails and impersonal blasts I haven’t requested. This step just takes a few seconds but drastically reduces my email bulk.

3. Respond: I do my best to answer every single email that comes directly to me, even if it means just writing “Thank you.” Since picking through emails to choose which to answer first wastes time, I start with the most recent and work my way down. At this point I don’t click on any links in emails and I don’t read lengthy articles; I save that for step 5 below.

4. File: Once I open an email, I don’t leave it in my inbox. I found that when I did leave emails in my inbox, I’d re-read them repeatedly each time I opened my email, and each time I’d waste more time trying to decide how to handle it. So I either delete it or move it to another folder I’ve set up — waiting, read, someday, travel, client-specific. Every time I go through my email, my goal is to empty my inbox.

5. Read and follow up: In whatever time I have left before my timer goes off, I go through my non-inbox folders, reading through newsletters, clicking on links, and following up on emails in my “waiting” file.

End: When my countdown timer sounds, I close out my email program. Once I’m done, I don’t return to my email — on any device — until my next scheduled session.

As I go through this process, I try not to use email to give someone negative feedback, and I rarely respond to negative feedback over email. Email is a great tool for transactional conversations (Where should we have lunch?), sharing information (Here’s that file, there’s someone I want you to meet), or showing appreciation (You spoke powerfully in that meeting, I’m touched by your support — thank you). For anything else, you’re better off calling or talking to someone face to face. I also do my best never to go back and forth with someone on email about something more than two or three times. If it’s gone that far, it’s usually a better idea to pick up the phone.

There are a few commonplace tools I use that I have found helpful in moving through emails quickly:

Signatures: Most email programs have the capability to create multiple signatures that you can choose to appear at the bottom of an email. I have customized several signatures that I use as responses to common emails I receive. For example, I have a pre-written reply to people who ask about joining my company, want me to review their book, express appreciation for something I’ve written, etc. I often customize those emails based on the sender, but the bulk of my response is already written.

Rules: Most email programs also have rules in which you can automatically send emails that fit certain criteria directly to other folders. For example, when I send out my weekly email linking people to a new article I’ve written, I receive several “out of office” replies. I set up a rule that sends any email with “out of office” in the subject line directly to trash. That way I don’t have to spend any time processing it.

Timer: This is essential to staying within my 30-minute time frame. When I didn’t use a timer it was too easy to just keep going.