Page 183 - Becoming a Successful Manager

174 BUILDING ON YOUR FOUNDATION

Clarity of Purpose

Make sure your purpose is clear when inviting people. Clarity of
purpose drives the rest of your planning decisions. Consider the
list below to determine why you are having this meeting. This may
seem like a laborious, manual process, but once you get good at it,
you will roll through it more naturally and quickly.
Effective, productive meetings have one or all of these three
purposes. Meetings are used to:

• Inform, educate, or share
• Discuss, review, or clarify

• Connect or bring together a group for a specific reason or
purpose

We interviewed one sales manager who had meetings every
Monday at 11:00 A.M. He told us 15 people were due to attend;
10 of them were local, and 5 of them connected through a Net
meeting. The only thing the attendees knew was that they had to
be at the meeting by 11:00 A.M. and they had to e-mail their prior
week’s sales results to the participants by 9:00 A.M. Experience
taught them that these were nothing but an administrative exer-
cise. So they began to treat them as such.
Think about the deterioration in the culture, trust, and
respect with each meeting and each e-mail. How much time will
the attendees invest in getting prepared for the meeting? How
attentive will they be?
However, even routine meetings can be valuable if they are
handled correctly. If we just take the fi rst step, you will feel how
different the meeting can be. Let’s take the same meeting and give
it a stated purpose.

The purpose of this meeting is as follows: