Rudds under the bed: Why your business needs some meetings

If there’s one thing Old Taskmaster detests more than anything else, it’s a meeting. Especially one that’s tasked with making a business decision.

The surest way to pick the IQ of a committee is to find the dumbest person there, then divide their IQ by the number of people standing around the table.

There’s only one thing Old Taskmaster detests more, however, and that’s a politician. And the reality is that there’s probably some already lurking around the office.

Now, of course, Old Taskmaster does not literally mean that you should expect to find Bill Shorten counting numbers in accounts or Julie Bishop preaching the word and staring down the competition in sales. As frightening as the prospect may be, you don’t have to worry about there being Rudds under the bed.

However, as soon as you have more than one team and one team leader in your office, you might find an even more bothersome form emerge: The inter-departmental office politician.

One such critter in Taskmaster Towers decided that marketing reports were confidential and therefore that information couldn’t be shared with the product designers. This was despite the fact the sales data should influence some of the decisions the designers make when putting together widgets.

Little power plays like that have the potential to hurt your business. And the way you find out them is, once a month or so, to have a sit-down meeting with each of your teams and ask them for feedback about how things are going in their department.

That means all members of the team, their team leader or supervisor and you sit down for a meeting. During the meeting, you ask for feedback from everyone in their department.

Occasionally, you might hear something – for example, a number of members of the design team complaining the essential data they need to design products being withheld by accounts. Or perhaps that the marketing manager, in a bid to create a personal fiefdom within your organisation, now wants all products cleared for approval by marketing in an extra unnecessary time-consuming ego trip of a process.

It seems from Canberra to your office, one thing politicians are good at doing is creating extra layers of bureaucracy for everyone else. Thankfully, this particular critter was caught out and dealt with before the factionocracy became too deeply engrained.

So while meetings are for the most part utterly worthless when it comes to making good decisions, team meetings can arm you with valuable information about how people within different teams see their situation and can be valuable in managing your business.

So, is there a would-be factional warlord amidst your team leaders? Don’t be the last to know. Call some meetings to see if you can catch them out.

Get it done – today!