24 B The Risk Register

The risk register ranks risks by the dollar value of each risk according to the operational definition of risk given earlier. Constructing the risk register on a spreadsheet allows risks to be sorted by dollar value so that the highest risks are always on top of the list. The risk register also facilitates keeping all risks in the same data base even though management actions may be active on only the top five or ten at any time. When a high risk is mitigated the expected dollar value of the risk is reduced and it falls out of the top five or ten but is still on the list. This enables reviewing mitigated risks to ensure they remain mitigated or to readdress a risk at a later time when all the higher risks have been mitigated to even lower values. An example of a simple risk register constructed on a spread sheet is shown in figure 9.

Figure 9.  An example template of a risk register constructed in columns on a spread sheet.

The risk type and impact if risk occurs are usually described as “if”, “then” statements. This helps the management team remember specifically what each risk entails as they conduct reviews over the life of the activity. Expected values are expressed in dollars, which facilitates both ranking and decisions about how much resources should be assigned to mitigation activities. I am assuming of course that in managing activities in your organization it is the practice to hold some fraction of the budget in reserve to handle unforeseen events. It is this reserve budget that is assigned to risk mitigation activities. Risk mitigation actions should be budgeted and scheduled as part on on-going work. A failure many inexperienced managers make is handling risks outside of the mainline budget and schedule. This undisciplined approach often leads to risk management degenerating into an action item list and finally to a reactive approach to unexpected events rather that a proactive approach to reduce the risks systematically.

A more complete risk register template than the example shown in figure 9 might contain columns for the risk number, title, description (if), impact (then), types (three columns: cost, schedule, quality or technical), probability of occurrence, cost impact, schedule impact, mitigation plan and mitigation schedule. The form of the risk register template is not critical so the team managing the risks should construct a template that contains the information they feel they need to effectively manage risks.

The risk register, if properly maintained and managed, is a sufficient tool for risk management on small and short duration projects. Setting aside an arbitrary management reserve budget to manage risks is ok for small projects. Portions of the reserve are allocated to mitigation of risks and the budgets and expenses for risk mitigation can be folded into the overall cost management system. Large, long duration projects or high value projects warrant a more focused approach to budgeting for risk management.

If you find that the pace of blog posts isn’t compatible with the pace you  would like to maintain in studying this material you can buy the book “The Manager’s Guide for Effective Leadership” in hard copy or for Kindle at:

http://www.amazon.com/Managers-Guide-Effective-Leadership-Organizations/dp/1449000673/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1346946310&sr=8-2&keywords=Joe+Jenney

or hard copy or for nook at:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/Joe-Jenney?keyword=Joe+Jenney&store=book

or hard copy or E-book at:

http://bookstore.authorhouse.com/Products/SKU-000269270/The-Managers-Guide-for-Effective-Leadership.aspx

24 A Introduction to Risk Management

The following three lectures define risk, outline a risk management process and provide examples of templates useful for risk management.

Risk is the consequence of things happening that negatively impact the performance of an organization’s planned activities. Risks arise from events that occur inside and outside an organization. The consequence of the event can impact the quality, cost or schedule of an activity, or some combination of these effects. There is risk in any activity but there are usually more risks associated with activities that are new to the organization. New activities include the introduction of new products or services or changes to the processes, people, materials or machines used to produce existing products or services. Risks to stable products and services arise from unplanned changes to the internal environment or changes in the external environment, such as the economy, costs of materials, labor market, customer preferences or actions by a competitor, a regulating body or a government agency. An effective manager faces up to risks and manages risks so that the negative impacts are minimized.

Definition of Risk

There is an operational definition of risk that aids in managing risk. This definition is:

Risk R is The Probability p of an Undesirable Event Occurring; Multiplied by The Consequence of the Event Occurrence measured in $, or R=p x $.

This definition allows risks to be quantified and ranked in relative importance so that the manager knows which risks to address first and to evaluate how much investment is reasonable to eliminate or reduce the consequence of the risk. The definition measures risk in dollars. Thus impacts to the quality of a product or service or to the schedule of delivering the product or service are converted to costs. Impacts to quality are converted to dollar costs via estimated warranty costs, cost of the anticipated loss of customers or loss of revenue due to anticipated levels of discounting prices. Schedule delays are converted to dollar costs by estimating the extra costs of labor during the delays and/or the loss of revenue due to lost sales caused by the schedule delays.

The key to good risk management is to address the highest risk first. There are three reasons to address the highest risk first. First is that mitigating a high risk can result in changes to plans, designs, approaches or other major elements in an activity. The earlier these changes are implemented the lower the cost of the overall activity because money and people resources are not wasted on work that has to be redone later. The second reason is that some activities may fail due to the impossibility of mitigating an inherent risk. The earlier this is determined the fewer resources are spent on the failed activity thus preserving resource for other activities. The third reason is that any activity is continually competing for resources with other activities. An activity that has mitigated its biggest risks has a better chance of competing for continued resource allocation than an activity that has gone on for some time and still has high risks.

Managing Risk

Managing risk is accomplished by taking actions before risks occur rather than reacting to occurrences of undesirable events. The steps in effective risk management are:

1.     Listing the most important requirements that the activity must meet to satisfy its customer(s). These are called Cardinal Requirements

2.     Identifying every risk to an activity that might occur that would have significant consequence to meeting each of the Cardinal Requirements

3.     Estimating the probability of occurrence of each risk and its consequences in terms of dollars

4.     Ranking the risks by the magnitude of the product of the probability and dollar consequence (i.e. by the definition of risk given above)

5.     Identifying proactive actions that can lower the probability of occurrence and/or the cost of occurrence of the top five or ten risks

6.     Selecting among the identified actions for those that are cost effective

7.     Assigning resources (funds and people) to the selected actions

8.     Managing the selected action until its associated risk is mitigated

9.     Identifying any new risks resulting from mitigation activities

10.  Replace mitigated risks with lower ranking or new risks as each is mitigated

11.  Conduct regular (weekly or biweekly) risk management reviews to:

·       Status risk mitigation actions

·       Brainstorm for new risks

·       Review that mitigated risks stay mitigated

In identifying risks it is important to involve as many people that are related to the activity as possible. This means people from senior management, your organization, other participating organizations and supporting organizations. Senior managers see risks that workers do not and workers see risks that managers don’t recognize. It is helpful to use a list of potential sources of risk in order to guide people’s thinking to be comprehensive. Your list might look like that shown in figure 7.

Figure 7 An example template for helping identify possible sources of risk to the customer’s cardinal requirements.

It also helps ensure completeness of understanding risks if each risk is classified as a technical, cost or schedule risk or a combination of these categories.

Risk Summary Grid and Risk Register

Two useful templates used in risk management are the risk summary grid and the risk register. The risk summary grid is a listing of the top ranked risks on a grid of probability vs. impact. The risk summary gird is excellent for showing all top risks on a single graphic and grouping the risks as low, medium or high. Typical grids are 3 x 3 or 5 x 5. An example 5 x 5 template is shown in figure 8.

Figure 8 An example of a 5 x 5 risk summary grid

The 5 x 5 risk summary grid enables risks to be classified as low, medium or high; typically color coded green, yellow and red respectively, and ranked in order of importance. Note that the definitions for low and medium are not standard. The definition used in figure 8 is conservative in limiting low risk to the six squares in the lower left of the grid. Others, e.g. the Risk Management Guide for DOD Acquisition (An excellent tutorial on risk management that is available as a free download at http://www.dau.mil/pubs/gdbks/risk_management.asp) define the entire first column plus six other lower left squares as low risk.

Relative importance is the product of probability and impact. Identified risks are assigned to a square according to the estimates of their probability of occurrence and impact to the overall activity. In figure 8 there is one medium risk, shown by the x in the square with a probability 0.3, impact 7 and therefore having a relative importance of 2.1. The numbers shown for impact are arbitrary and must be defined appropriate to the activity for which risk is being managed.

A typical approach is to construct a four column by six row table with Impact being the heading of the first column and the numbers 1,3,5,7,9 (or whatever five numbers or letters you choose) in each succeeding row of the first column. The remaining three columns are labeled Technical, Schedule and Cost. Each box in the rows under the Technical, Schedule and Cost headings is defined appropriately for the activity at risk. For example, costs could be defined as either percentage of budget or in actual monetary units. Similarly schedule can be defined as percent slip or actual time slip.

The process using a 3 x 3 risk summary grid typically assigns risks as 0.1, 0.3 or 0.9 and impacts as 1, 3 or 9. There are three squares for each of the low, medium and high risk classifications with relative importance values ranging from 0.1 to 8.1 according to the products of probability and impact. Specific processes or numerical values are not important. What is important is having a process that allows workers and managers to assess and rank risks and to communicate these risks to each other, and in some cases to customers. The simple risk summary grids are useful tools for accomplishing these objectives and are most useful in the early stages of the life cycle of an activity and for communicating an overall picture of risks. The risk summary grid can be used as a tool in risk management meetings but a better tool is the risk register discussed in the next lecture.

If you find that the pace of blog posts isn’t compatible with the pace you  would like to maintain in studying this material you can buy the book “The Manager’s Guide for Effective Leadership” in hard copy or for Kindle at:

http://www.amazon.com/Managers-Guide-Effective-Leadership-Organizations/dp/1449000673/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1346946310&sr=8-2&keywords=Joe+Jenney

or hard copy or for nook at:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/Joe-Jenney?keyword=Joe+Jenney&store=book

or hard copy or E-book at:

http://bookstore.authorhouse.com/Products/SKU-000269270/The-Managers-Guide-for-Effective-Leadership.aspx

23 B Risk Management, Theory of Constraints and Process Improvement

I include risk management in this course because poor risk management is the second highest contributor to failure in projects or in major changes in operations for manufacturing and service organizations. (Don’t forget that team dynamics is the primary contributor to failure in such activities.) A second reason for including risk management is that inexperienced managers are the ones that typically ignore risk management or just give it lip service. If you are going to be an effective leader you must understand and practice sound risk management. Risk management is the topic of the following lecture.

I include theory of constraints because it is often left out of treatments of control and in some traditional approaches to manufacturing this failure leads to promoting techniques that are inappropriate and cause inefficiencies. The lecture following risk management is an introduction to theory of constraints and I hope it leads the student to further study of this important topic.

The remainder of this course addresses that portion of control that deals with what is typically called process improvement or quality improvement. The objective of the process improvement part of control is to assess work processes and to make continuous improvements to these processes so that employees’ jobs are easier and more cost efficient due to fewer and fewer quality problems and to reduced use of resources; including labor, materials and maintenance.

There are many versions of process improvement in use. Six Sigma and total quality management (TQM) are two popular versions. Kaizan is a Japanese term for continuous improvement and many organizations use this term to describe their process improvement work. Sometimes Kaizan is used to simplify processes without gathering data and some quality gurus are critical of non-data driven process improvement. Another term used by manufacturing organizations is Lean. Lean is using a set of tools or methods that improves manufacturing processes by eliminating waste and errors. Some organizations combine Lean and Six Sigma into Lean Six Sigma. Whereas both Six Sigma and TQM are proven to be effective I favor TQM, or data driven Kaizen if you prefer the Japanese term. Let me give short descriptions of the two approaches and then discuss the reasons I favor TQM.

Six Sigma thoroughly trains a small number of people and then empowers these trained specialists to work with other workers and managers to improve processes throughout the enterprise. These specialists get titles according to the amount of training they have received, e.g. those with extensive training are usually called black belts or master black belts. An experienced manager is selected to manage the specialists and their process improvement activities. Other managers are given overview training so that they know what to expect and what is expected of them.

In the version of TQM that I have practiced all employees in the enterprise, workers and managers, receive about 50 hours of basic training in process improvement techniques. A very few receive additional training in special techniques and serve as a resource to all the workers and managers. After training, all workers and managers are empowered to work on process improvement of the processes they own, i.e. the processes they use in their day to day work. There is a coordinator to authorize teams and facilitate access to any data needed by the teams or to the specialists that provide analysis beyond the capabilities of the team. The authorization is necessary to prevent workers from getting involved in several teams at once and impacting productivity by spending too much time on process improvement at the expense of process execution.

Either of these approaches is effective and if your enterprise is already involved in one of these or a related approach then stick with it. If your enterprise is not yet involved in process improvement then I strongly recommend the TQM approach. The advantage of TQM is that it empowers every employee to control processes they own. This empowerment results in two benefits compared to approaches like Six Sigma that empower only a few specially trained personnel. First, empowering employees to have control over their own processes is highly motivating. It is one of the things required for employees to reach Maslow’s highest level of needs fulfillment, i.e. self-actualization. Second, employees at any level know more about the processes they own than their supervisors, or any specialist, because they are more intimately involved with the processes. They feel, smell, hear and experience details of their process that supervisors or specialists do not experience. They are better at recognizing what aspects of their processes need improvement first, second and so on. They are also better at developing improvement approaches because often they have been thinking about better ways to do their job for a long time. They are inclined to look for improvements that make their job easier as well as more cost effective.

The disadvantages of the Six Sigma type approaches from my experience are that sometimes the workers resent outside experts coming to change their work processes and the outside experts aren’t as familiar with the work processes as are the employees that own the processes. I have observed that the process owners tend to create simple and effective improvements whereas the highly trained experts tend to go for elegant and expensive improvements, but not necessarily any better improvements. Another disadvantage is that the experts attack the most important processes first and work their way through enterprise processes a few at a time, depending on how many experts there are. With TQM all processes are subject to attention at any time. The process owners naturally prioritize processes they own but even simple processes get attention that are unlikely to be addressed in a Six Sigma approach until all higher priority processes have been addressed.

An apparent disadvantage of TQM is that all employees must be trained and therefore the training costs tend to be higher than for Six Sigma, assuming only a few employees are given the full Six Sigma training. I believe this extra cost is more than offset by the more comprehensive attack on process improvement that TQM achieves and from the increase in employee motivation that results from empowering employees to have control over their own processes. TQM also requires a more careful introduction to empowering employees after they have been trained. There must be boundaries to the empowerment and these boundaries must be carefully communicated to the employees as they are empowered. Otherwise employees adapt their individual definitions of empowerment and some naturally expand the boundaries beyond what is acceptable in an efficient enterprise that is under control. Obvious examples of items employees are not empowered to change include recipes, standards and accounting rules; changes of which must be handled very carefully and usually with management involvement.

Exercise

This is an introductory lecture and no exercise is required unless the student is unfamiliar with text book methods of control for manufacturing, projects and service organizations and with the differences between financial accounting and management accounting. If you aren’t familiar with these methods of control and cost management then take the time now to learn the basics. It is important to effective process improvement that changes to processes do not violate sound basic principles. It may be frustrating to put this course on hold while you study other subjects for several weeks but it is beneficial in the long term. If you are familiar with these basics then go on to the next lecture.

If you find that the pace of blog posts isn’t compatible with the pace you  would like to maintain in studying this material you can buy the book “The Manager’s Guide for Effective Leadership” at:

http://www.amazon.com/Managers-Guide-Effective-Leadership-Organizations/dp/1449000673/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1346946310&sr=8-2&keywords=Joe+Jenney

or hard copy or for nook at:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/Joe-Jenney?keyword=Joe+Jenney&store=book

or hard copy or E-book at:

http://bookstore.authorhouse.com/Products/SKU-000269270/The-Managers-Guide-for-Effective-Leadership.aspx

23A Introduction to Control and Process Improvement

Basics

The lectures up to this point deal with the management functions of staffing, motivating and communicating. These functions are the portion of effective leadership that derives from the fundamentals of Theory Z and are the people related functions. Executing these functions effectively are necessary to achieving highly motivated workers.  Now I turn to processes. Effective organizations require both highly motivated and well trained people and effective processes. Even the most highly motivated people with superior skills cannot be successful if they are encumbered with processes that produce defective products or services. In addition, even the best processes encounter problems from time to time due to changes in input materials, worker actions, business environment or machine related problems that are often subtle and hard to identify. Therefore the effective leader must have the skills needed to improve processes that produce defective outputs and the skills to fix and maintain good processes when unforeseen changes cause problems.

Processes involve the management function of control. Control is a complex management function and is specialized to the organization type. Whereas most of the fundamental principles of control are the same for different types of organization the implementation is vastly different for manufacturing, service or project organizations. Also specialization is necessary for nonprofit organizations compared to profit based organizations and within the many types of service organizations, e.g. health care vs. education.

A comprehensive treatment of the control function is beyond the scope of this course. This course treats four aspects of control that apply to all organizations. These are risk management, theory of constraints, process improvement and leading the team. Early in this course effective leadership was defined to be derived from combining the principles of Theory Z and Process Improvement. The theory of constraints can be considered part of process improvement although it was developed separately and is treated separately here. I do not know the formal history of risk management but it is certainly a critical part of the control function and a necessary skill for effective leaders so it is included here. Leading the team is of course the fundamental job of the organization’s manager and I’ll end with a brief description of a process that has proven effective for many organizations.

An important tool related to control that is essential in today’s environment is Taguchi methods for design of experiments. These are statistical methods that require a well-trained person to use effectively. Low and mid-level managers should have sufficient training to be able to identify when Taguchi methods might apply to problems in their organizations. Every enterprise should have access to a person with extensive training in these methods. It can be the same person experienced in statistics as necessary for oversight of process improvement activities discussed in later lectures. It is important to allow only well trained individuals to design and monitor Taguchi experiments. Properly used Taguchi methods save time, money and result in higher quality designs and products. However, used by inadequately trained personnel these methods can lead to costly mistakes.

I do not treat Taguchi design of experiments further in this book because of the extensive training necessary to be of value. Based on my experience with these methods I recommend that students seek training from trainers familiar with the students’ type of organization. Seeing examples of the methods use on problems familiar to students help them recognize where the methods can be useful in their organizations. Students in engineering organizations can benefit from reading Don P. Clausing’s book “Total Quality Development: A Step-By-Step Guide to World Class Concurrent Engineering” and Madhav S. Phadke’s book “Quality Engineering Using Robust Design”. Students in manufacturing, research in any science, and perhaps all students, may benefit from Genichi Taguchi and Yoshiko Yokoyama’s “Taguchi Methods: Design of Experiments”, although I have not personally read this book. I regret that I cannot recommend specific training sources for students in marketing, advertising, bio-technologies and other fields involving statistics but I suspect some research would find such sources.

In studying Taguchi’s methods do not confuse Taguchi’s strategy for quality engineering with his design of experiments methods. Only engineering managers need to be familiar with Taguchi’s strategy for quality engineering, which has the three stages of system design, parameter design and tolerance design. Taguchi’s design of experiment methods have much wider utility. Reading Wikipedia’s discussion of Taguchi methods provides students with a good starting point for more in-depth study of methods pertaining to their work.

The primary emphasis of the remainder of this course is on process improvement. Before beginning these subjects I provide some background relating to control in order to convince the student that control must be tailored to the type of organization.

Background on control

I assume that the student is part of an enterprise that has effective cost and schedule controls in place and that the student understands these methods. Presumably these are standard methods of control for manufacturing, services or projects as appropriate for the student’s organization. If these assumptions are incorrect and/or the student doesn’t know how control differs for manufacturing, services and projects then self-study is needed. I recommend Part II, Chapters 4-10 of “Production and Operations Management” by James B. Dilworth.

Unless the student is in the financial organization of the enterprise study in management accounting is recommended. Management accounting differs from the accounting used in financial departments, which is often tailored to tax laws and accounting standards. These tax and associated accounting standards are fine for their intended purpose but they do not provide a simple and clear picture of the costs of operating an organization or enterprise. This often leads to managers doing stupid and incorrect things in attempts to manipulate overheads in hopes of reducing costs. To easily understand and manage costs correctly the methods of management accounting that focus on cash inflows, cash outflows and true product costs are preferable. A book I have found helpful is “Managerial Accounting- Concepts for Planning, Control, and Decision Making” by Ray H. Garrison.

Control methods must match the organization type; applying methods appropriate to manufacturing to projects results in drastic decreases in effectiveness and vice versa. A few comments help to explain why control methods must match the organization type.

A manufacturing organization might have a split of costs of 80% material and 20 % labor whereas a project might have 80% labor and 20% material. In this example materials costs drive manufacturing costs and effective manufacturing control minimizes inventory and work in progress while maximizing through put per day or per hour. Labor cost drives overall cost in the project example and effective project control requires maintaining plenty of spare parts and even spare assemblies so that schedule delays due to lack of parts are avoided. The cost of a few extra spares is small compared to the “marching army” costs of labor idled while waiting for parts to be delivered if a part fails or is damaged. Note that both organizations are maximizing the productive work per time period but the most effective method of handling material depends on the material/labor cost split. Most service organization’s costs are almost all labor so that the details of how material costs are handled have little impact on the organization’s success. Restaurants are an exception in which the cost of food ingredients is a significant portion of overall costs and must be managed carefully to achieve business success.

Note also that research and development (R &D) is a project so control for R & D in a manufacturing organization should be different than that for production; a requirement sometimes lost on poorly trained manufacturing managers. Similarly, purchasing personnel trained for a manufacturing organization typically don’t understand control for R & D and try to impose constraints appropriate only to manufacturing, e.g. no sole source procurements.

Mangers of R&D activities in manufacturing organizations should expect problems with purchasing and stand up to purchasing people. In a manufacturing organization that I managed at one stage in my career the purchasing manager insisted that the sole source procurements the R & D people wanted were illegal until I had a government auditor personally explain to him that he was wrong.

A similar problem can happen when the quality department in a manufacturing organization is also involved in R&D or project work in the same organization. They may have rules calling for source inspection that are appropriate for production material but not for special parts needed for R&D or projects, e.g. parts that cannot be handled except in a special environment.

There are sometimes sound business reasons for combining two types of organization in the same business unit, e.g., manufacturing and projects or manufacturing and services. If one type is much larger than the other type in such combinations then the management tends to be from the larger type. Unless these managers are familiar with the different control needed for each type of organizations they can cause a lot of inefficiencies. If you find yourself managing in a mixed organization make sure you learn the proper control techniques for each.

Exercises: There are no exercises for this introductory lecture.

If you find that the pace of blog posts isn’t compatible with the pace you  would like to maintain in studying this material you can buy the book “The Manager’s Guide for Effective Leadership” in hard copy or for Kindle at:

http://www.amazon.com/Managers-Guide-Effective-Leadership-Organizations/dp/1449000673/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1346946310&sr=8-2&keywords=Joe+Jenney

or hard copy or for nook at:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/Joe-Jenney?keyword=Joe+Jenney&store=book

or hard copy or E-book at:

http://bookstore.authorhouse.com/Products/SKU-000269270/The-Managers-Guide-for-Effective-Leadership.aspx

Review of Lectures 17 - 22

The first 16 lectures focused on how to manage so that you increase the motivation of your staff. Motivating your organization was addressed first because highly motivated workers are necessary for an effective organization and necessary to work with an effective leader in making the organization changes discussed in the lectures following lecture 16. Lectures 17-22 address the important management functions of staffing and communicating. Executing these two functions skillfully is critical to building a world class organization. The reason you should be building a world class organization is that today technology has made the workplace a global environment for almost all types of organization. If your organization isn’t world class you are likely to lose customers to competitors somewhere in the world that offer higher quality goods or services at equal or lower prices. Even governments and medical organizations are outsourcing work that can be done better or cheaper in other organizations.

Lectures 17 addressed staffing; specifically how to find and recruit the top people needed to build a world class organization and achieve a low staff turnover. It is necessary to achieve a low staff turnover rate because replacing people is both expensive and time consuming. As your organization becomes more and more effective you can expect to grow, assuming you are in an activity that permits growth. If you need to grow your staff at 10 to 15% each year you will be extremely busy with recruiting plus running your day to day work. If you have to replace workers because of a high turnover rate you may not be able to keep up with your staffing needs or afford the recruiting costs for the best talent. Lectures 1-16 taught how to develop a work environment that is conducive to low turnover. Also important to low turnover is not making mistakes in recruiting. An example of a recruiting process was discussed in lecture 17 that is proven to help recruit workers that meet an organization’s needs and fit well with the organization’s culture so that they are likely to be long term employees. The best approach to finding world class talent is to develop and maintain a network of people that are always on the lookout for exceptional young people that are candidate employees for your organization.

Lecture 18 covered the four basic principles for matching people to jobs. These are:

1.     Decisions about people are the most important decisions a manager makes

2.     Workers have a right  to competent leaders

3.     If a worker does not perform then the manager has made a mistake; don’t blame the worker

4.     Don’t give new people major assignments until they are familiar with how the organization works

Factors to be considered in matching workers to jobs include:

• Matching the skills and experience of candidates to the requirements of the jobs
• The compatibility of the personalities and work styles of candidates and potential coworkers
• The impact of removing candidates from their current positions
• The potential for career development of each candidate in the new position
• Matching the style of innovativeness of the candidates to that demanded by the job
• The candidates’ knowledge of the way things are done independent of what the organization chart says
• The opinions of other managers 

Lecture 19 provides guidelines for managing your time so that you accomplish more in the time you have available for your job and other facets of your life. There are five main guidelines to remember and keep in practice:

1. Write out six to eight short and long term goals and plans with specific actions for your work and the physical, mental and spiritual parts of your life.
2. Schedule the actions over a week at a time, carry your schedule with you at all times and do your best to follow it.
3. Remember to be effective with people and efficient with other work activities. This means spend as much time as necessary with people to ensure you understand them and they understand your plans and directions. Have unscheduled time in your schedule so that you have the flexibility to accept time wasters that are necessary to be effective with people.
4. Don’t allow yourself to become a workaholic, i.e. working so many hours that you do not have enough time for the important non work things in your life. If your life is unbalanced then you are not as effective in your job as you could be.
5. Learn how to use administrative help effectively if it is available to you. Learn to dictate to secretaries and to electronic media. Encourage your workers to use efficient practices.

Lectures 20-22 discuss ways to help workers manage their time. This topic was outlined in the introduction titled “Lectures 20-22” that is between lecture 19 and lecture 20. Go back and review that introduction before proceeding to lecture 23. If any topics in the outline are hazy reread the appropriate sections in the lectures.

If you find that the pace of blog posts isn’t compatible with the pace you  would like to maintain in studying this material you can buy the book “The Manager’s Guide for Effective Leadership” at:

http://www.amazon.com/Managers-Guide-Effective-Leadership-Organizations/dp/1449000673/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1346946310&sr=8-2&keywords=Joe+Jenney

or hard copy or for nook at:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/Joe-Jenney?keyword=Joe+Jenney&store=book

or hard copy or E-book at:

http://bookstore.authorhouse.com/Products/SKU-000269270/The-Managers-Guide-for-Effective-Leadership.aspx

22 Identify work that can be done better by others

An area related to time wasting is those situations where overzealous cost cutting eliminates too many support staff with the result that extra administrative work is forced back on highly paid knowledge workers. These cases are not always clear cut. I can describe the boundaries but I can’t give you foolproof answers because there are human factors involved that are unknowable. A few examples best illustrate what is involved.

Secretarial support

My favorite is secretarial support. Before personal computers, knowledge workers either had personal secretaries or access to a pool of secretaries who had the typewriters. The knowledge worker either wrote drafts in longhand or dictated to a secretary versed in shorthand or to a dictating machine and the secretary did the typing. With the availability of personal computers and good word processing software many knowledge workers prefer to do their own typing because they now have access to typing equipment and because they are spared from having to organize their thinking as required for dictation. This has led to fewer and fewer secretaries. Is this cost effective? A knowledge worker typically types at 20 to 40 words per minute at best. A secretary types at 60 to 80 words per minute and is paid 1/4 to 1/3 that of a knowledge worker. If only the direct typing time and cost were involved it is clear that having secretaries do the typing is about ten times cheaper than allowing workers to do their own typing.

Other factors affecting the cost comparison include the cost of dictation time, editing time and time to get the product finished. Experience and experimental data has shown that it is about three times faster to dictate something than it is to write or type it so; at most, the time for dictation cuts the advantage of secretarial typing to about a factor of three. My experience indicates that editing is faster if done using standard journalism techniques on paper copies, which again favors the dictation/typist approach. However, not all knowledge workers take the time to learn these editing techniques and some secretaries aren’t familiar with them so I will call the editing cost equal. I will also ignore the advantage dictation has in that less editing is usually required. This is because most people outline a document before they dictate whereas those who do their own typing typically just start typing without an outline.

That leaves only the cost of time to get to a finished product. This cost is the cost of information latency and depends on the product involved, the dictation process in use and the worker involved.  Information latency cost is very high for situations where knowledge workers are exchanging vital task information because the latency time translates directly to delays in other work products and thereby to increased costs. If the product is small then it is more cost effective for the worker to type and send an email. If the product is so large that it must be typed, reviewed, edited and then distributed it is more cost effective to dictate the work and have a skilled typist type and distribute the work. In these examples the most cost effective approach is the one that gets the data to users quickest.

Most emails are small and it isn’t convenient or cost effective to dictate and have a secretary type and send them. At the other extreme are reports and similar paperwork that have deadlines days or weeks away. In these cases the information latency cost is negligible and the dictation/typist approach is about a factor of three cheaper. Thus the most cost effective balance of what should be directly typed by the worker and what should be dictated and then typed by a typist depends on the mix of products and the dictation process. The product mix varies from organization to organization and likely from time to time.

However, if the product mix was the only factor remaining in determining the cost effective solution then it could be worked out by a diligent manager. The problem is there is also a human factors issue that is worker dependent. Some workers want to do all their own typing no matter how costly it is and they present all kinds of spurious arguments to defend their position. Others are more than happy to use the secretaries as much as possible and perhaps even for things they should do themselves. I believe this human factors issue makes it too hard to get the exact right answer because the most cost effective balance includes some disgruntled workers and it’s not possible to accurately estimate the resulting cost of the inefficiency due to their being disgruntled.

I believe that modern electronic tools, including personal computers, the intra/inter nets and recording devices so small they are embedded in cell phones and MP3 players, make dictation even more cost effective than in the past.  E-mail, fixed and portable, and cell phones have greatly reduced information latency but expensive knowledge workers spend a lot of time inefficiently typing. Sound files recorded on personal computers, or portable devices can be sent almost instantly to typists anywhere and text documents, with corrected grammar and punctuation, can be typed and returned about as fast as a slow typing knowledge worker can type a document. This modern technology has the capability to reduce information latency for most work requiring typing but it doesn’t seem to have caught on for two reasons. First, workers wanting to do the typing themselves, even though they are inefficient typists and second, overzealous cost cutting leading to reducing the availability of skilled typists.

Given all these factors what should the effective leader do? My advice is, if you have access to secretarial support use it as much as possible. Experiment with the various new technologies for dictation and collect data on how much of your time is saved and how long it takes to get data to users for the various work products in your organization. Keep it up long enough that you are comfortable dictating and have adequate data to make decisions. The experience and the data will help you determine what is best for you and your work. When you have the results share them with your workers and encourage them to use the best practices you have determined. But be prepared for all kinds of arguments why they can’t effectively use dictation.

Administrative support

The personal computer has complicated the issue of administrative support even further. Take for example, travel arrangements and expense reporting. In the past workers submitted a travel request and a secretary or administrative assistant made the travel arrangements. At the end of the travel the worker gave the travel expense data to the secretary or administrative assistant who then filled out an expense report for the worker to sign before it was submitted to the financial system. Now it is likely that the worker goes on line and makes travel arrangements and fills out an on line expense report upon return. Here again the worker is doing work that a less costly secretary or administrator can do much faster. This example and many others like it aren’t so easy to analyze. There is no question that having an expensive knowledge worker do such work in place of a support person isn’t cost effective in the simplest analysis. However, here again human factors are involved.

If the knowledge worker completes all the work scheduled or expected of them in a given time period and also does the administrative work then clearly it is cheaper to layoff the support people. I am convinced that in many cases this happens. The knowledge workers absorb this extra work and put in the extra time to get it done without an increase in compensation. On paper it looks like the organization has gained in cost effectiveness in such cases. My opinion and it is only an opinion as I have no data to back it up, is that the organization does gain up to a point but loses after that. I think the knowledge worker can absorb some administrative tasks but at some point the administrative tasks begin to interfere with the workers ability to focus on the tasks they were hired to do. When knowledge workers are continually interrupted from their main work they become inefficient because they have to spend time revisiting thought processes, and they make more mistakes because they are distracted. I believe some organizations today are fooling themselves. They are employing extra knowledge workers to cover for the inefficiencies of existing knowledge workers brought on by pushing more and more administrative tasks onto these workers in the guise of being more cost effective by laying off administrative personnel.

Having made the case that determining the optimum number of administrative workers is complex and involves factors that are unknowable what should the effective leader do? My advice is to make your mistakes on the side of having too many administrative workers rather than too few. First because having too few leads to having to hire additional knowledge workers and the optimum number of knowledge workers is the minimum number required to get work done with no administrative overhead assigned to the knowledge workers. This is because of the costs of data latency and the hidden costs of extra communications between workers incurred when there is more than the minimum number of knowledge workers. It is also less costly to err by having one or two extra administrative workers than to have even one extra knowledge worker due to the large difference in salaries between knowledge workers and administrative workers.

Treat support people with respect

Before leaving this topic I must remind you of a couple of things that can undermine the effectiveness of your organization. First, never ask a secretary or an administrative person to do something for you while you wait for it that you could do yourself. Besides the fact that it is simply rude behavior it takes two people’s time instead of one. It is important to treat secretaries and administrative people as professionals and to give them as much responsibility as each one’s skills and experience allows. Think of them as knowledge workers just like the rest of your workers. Then you realize that the more work they do at their relatively low salary is less work you have to pay for at the higher salary of other workers. Second, when you are assembling a team to solve a crisis don’t forget to include secretaries or administrative workers that have responsibilities for portions of the process that is in crisis. Very often such workers have more intimate knowledge of process problems than others that have less day to day involvement in the processes.  I have worked in organizations whose culture just won’t allow them to include secretaries or admin people in process improvement teams. If your organization’s culture includes such thinking you need to work to change the culture in order to gain the benefit of all the skills and all the experience in the organization.

Exercise

The objective of this exercise is to determine the size of the largest document that you can type more cost effectively than you can dictate and have typed for you. For documents larger than this size dictation is more efficient than typing and for smaller documents typing the document yourself is more efficient. Although this takes some time it is well worth knowing in the long term. If you have software that translates dictation to text you can modify this exercise to compare the time to type and edit something to the time to dictate and edit the software transcription.

1.     Pick two similar, but unrelated topics, e.g. a recent sports event you watched and a recent repair job you did around the house or yard. Start with either topic and write 250 to 300 words, i.e. about a page, about it. If it is your habit to outline work before you type it then do that. If you don’t normally outline then just begin typing. Time yourself and record the time it takes you to outline and type, or just to type a page, edit it, save the file and email it to yourself. The word count and the time will give you an effective typing speed. For example, if you actually type 30 words per minute it should take you ten minutes to type 300 words plus the time it takes to think about what to write, edit, save and email, say another four to five minutes so that the task overall takes about 15 minutes for an effective speed of 20 words per minute. If you outline first it should be about the same overall time since you are likely to spend three to four minutes outlining but you won’t have to spend as much time thinking during the typing and there is less editing of the draft.

2.     If you have a pc with a microphone set it up so you can record a sound file. If not use the recording capability on your MP3 players, PDA or cell phone and transfer the sound file into your pc. Next determine the time it takes to outline and then dictate about 250 or 300 words on the second topic, save the sound file and email it to yourself. If you can’t stand outlining then you can skip that step and just dictate the sound file directly. If you are somewhat used to outlining and dictating you will have accomplished the outlining, dictating, saving and emailing in about seven or perhaps eight minutes. Record your own time but for now assume it is eight minutes.

3.     Account for the time a typist would take in opening your file, transcribing it, checking it, saving it and emailing it back to you. Assume you dictated at about 80 words per minute and the typist transcribes at the same speed. Thus it takes about 3.75 minutes to transcribe your 300 words. Suppose it takes about the same time to check the work and an additional half minute for corrections, saving and emailing for a total of eight minutes.

4.     Now you have the data needed to estimate the size of document above which it saves you time to dictate the document and the size above which it is more cost effective to dictate. For the example discussed so far it took 15 minutes of your time to type a 300 word document and only eight minutes to dictate 300 words. Assuming the typist makes about 1/3 your salary the cost of dictating is only 71% of the cost of typing it yourself for this example.

By now you have figured out that I have gamed you. There is no size of document beyond a small paragraph that is faster for you to type or cheaper for you to type unless you assumed some unreasonably large overhead times relating to dictation. The important factor is information latency. If you can get critical data faster by typing yourself, e.g. via email, then it is more effective and cost effective. Otherwise it is always more efficient and cost effective to dictate rather than type unless you are the rare manager that can type at 100 words per minute. The point of this exercise was to get you to try dictation so that you would see it is relatively easy. It gets easier as you get used to it.

If you find that the pace of blog posts isn’t compatible with the pace you  would like to maintain in studying this material you can buy the book “The Manager’s Guide for Effective Leadership” at:

http://www.amazon.com/Managers-Guide-Effective-Leadership-Organizations/dp/1449000673/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1346946310&sr=8-2&keywords=Joe+Jenney

or hard copy or for nook at:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/Joe-Jenney?keyword=Joe+Jenney&store=book

or hard copy or E-book at:

http://bookstore.authorhouse.com/Products/SKU-000269270/The-Managers-Guide-for-Effective-Leadership.aspx

21B Managing Meetings

Crisis Meetings

Crises are everyday occurrences in most complex organizations. They must be dealt with rapidly and effectively as discussed previously in lecture 20. Meetings are necessary and they should be staged to minimize wasting time of workers involved. Stage the meetings as follows:

·       First meeting- gather only those likely to have data needed to define the problem

·       Second meeting- gather only those necessary to solve the problem

·       Follow-up meetings- gather only those needed to status the problem and plan for solution. (Crises are abnormal events so standard information systems aren’t likely to be adequate to status progress and brief meetings such as daily stand-ups are needed.)

Think about how the crisis solving team can be structured so that few meetings are needed. For example, if a manager is available with the necessary problem solving skills that manger can be part of the team and be responsible for reporting status so that other team members need only concentrate on problem solving.

Work Meetings

Many work tasks require collaboration of knowledge workers and collaboration requires communication. Work communication can be informal face to face or electronic involving just two or three workers or it can be formal meetings involving large numbers of workers. Managers are involved as organizers, facilitators, workers or all three roles. Useful guidelines for work meetings include:

·       Separate status reviews from working sessions

·       Keep working sessions small and informal

·       Keep status reviews from becoming working sessions

·       Exploit modern technology including all forms of electronic communications

·       Develop agreed upon guidelines for electronic communications

·       Hold working sessions and status reviews at fixed times and places so that people prepare and attend automatically

A fundamental principle is to minimize information latency* by means appropriate to each situation. If possible co-locate team members to reduce the need for frequent meetings to exchange information.  [* Information latency is the time between when information is generated and the time it is available to others depending on the information for the next steps in their work.]

The availability of inexpensive large screen display projectors, n to one video switches and inter/intra nets makes it cost effective to set up special work rooms where teams of 10 to 25 knowledge workers can gather with their laptops and software tools to simultaneously work and share work results. Many organizations now use such facilities for teams to gather for intense work and information sharing periods of three to four hours two or three times weekly. These sessions must be well planned and workers must come prepared to work and share results in real time. Planning, documenting work and time consuming tasks are performed in between sessions in the work rooms. This approach is called by a number of names but Integrated Concurrent Engineering (ICE) is a common name. This approach is effective because it reduces information latency from minutes to seconds or hours to minutes. It is proven to reduce cost and schedule of complex projects by factors of three to ten.

 If you are responsible or desire to be responsible for teams of knowledge workers I recommend you become familiar with ICE. Don’t let the term engineering dissuade you from investigating this approach for any knowledge worker activity.   There is adequate information on the web so I will not include the details here. Start with:

Observation, Theory, and Simulation of Integrated Concurrent Engineering by Chachere, Kunz and Levitt, CIFE Working Paper #WP087, STANFORD UNIVERSITY, August 2004, or

The Integrated Concurrent Enterprise by David B. Stagney, MIT Thesis, 2003.

Knowledge workers spend much of their time in work meetings and much of the time not in meetings in their ubiquitous cubicles. If your organization is housed in cubicles consider arranging the work space of small teams; those with two to eight members, in a common cubicle. This can often be done by removing partitions or rearranging the cubicles. The objective is to enable the small team’s members to see and talk to each other from their normal workstations. This eliminates the need to get up and walk to another cubicle to ask a question, sending an email or calling a meeting to obtain data from teammates. Information latency is greatly reduced for the small team thereby increasing its efficiency. Yes, it likely increases unproductive social conversation but this loss is more than offset by the increase in efficiency for most teams. For teams larger than about eight it makes more sense to use the ICE technique mentioned in the preceding paragraph.

If you work in a large enterprise with multiple locations it is likely that you and your organization are involved in work spread across locations. In such cases it is impossible to physically co-locate workers but virtual co-location is possible with modern teleconferencing and collaboration software. In planning uses of this technology seek to drive information latency as low as practical as well as to coordinate and status work. In my experience these modern techniques are effective if workers that must interact electronically are first brought together in one location for a day or two to get to know each other. Face to face interaction enables workers to learn each other’s work style and quirks. This makes it easier to understand each other later when interacting via electronic communications in spite of the filtering imposed by these methods.

Be aware that small organizations may not know how to organize to work big projects and large organizations may treat small projects the same as large projects and overkill on status meetings when informal communication is adequate. This is because the methods needed to effectively manage projects do not scale with the size of the project. Methods don’t scale because much of the communication that takes place in the work place is informal communication. Let me explain how this impacts work with extreme examples.

Informal communication is completely adequate if everyone involved in a project is located in the same room. Information needed by one worker from another is available by direct asking. Information needed by all can be posted on the walls so there is little need for formally scheduled meetings. Contrast this tiny project with a giant complex project involving several enterprises located in several different parts of the country or world and each enterprise using its own data bases of project information as well as shared data bases. Workers do not even know who is responsible for generating the information they need, let alone being able to ask for it, without there being formal organization, organization charts, descriptions of responsibilities and similar documentation plus the many types of meetings associated with large projects. Note however that within each separate part of the project there is informal communications working locally as always.

If you are responsible for a new project that is either much larger or much smaller than those you and your organization are experienced with it is wise to call in someone with experience with projects of the size of your new project to help you avoid serious mistakes in organizing the project and structuring the meetings necessary to ensure effective communications.  Mistakes in organizing the project or structuring meetings lead to major time wasters that are also money wasters and threaten the success of the project.

The discussion above is couched in terms of projects because projects have limited lifetimes and organizations that do project works face these problems repeatedly. All organizations are faced with project work from time to time. However, the principles apply to other work types and problems of scale arise in the initial stages of setting up an organization or when the size of the organization increases or decreases in size substantially.

I now digress from discussing work meetings with a personal story about the effects of scale on organizations. Feel free to skip this story as it is just an example of the principles described above applied to manufacturing. I was responsible for two manufacturing plants, plant A producing a product at a rate of about 100 per day and plant B a similar product at a rate of about 1000 per day. Applying the methods that are the subject of this course we had improved the effectiveness of plant A to the point that we had the space and skills available to absorb plant B’s work, which would make plant A even more cost effective. My boss, supporting the move but having a lot more experience in manufacturing than I, told me that my plant A team wouldn’t be able to handle the new work because of the difference in rate. Having the arrogance of ignorance I told him my plant A team was a crackerjack team that was familiar with the materials, processes and machines involved with the higher rate product and I was confident they could do the job. Well the boss was right. My team was indeed familiar with everything involved but the difference in rate. They tried to use the work flow management techniques that worked well at a rate of 100 per day on the 1000 per day production line and these techniques were inadequate. I won’t admit to the amount of money we lost before we got proper work flow management processes in place for the higher rate production but I will say that I was reminded of it several times by the top level financial people in the enterprise.

Problem Solving or Brainstorming Meetings

Problem solving meetings are part of crisis meetings and are in a class of meetings that involve brainstorming. Problem solving meetings are particularly prone to wandering off focus and wasting time. If the meeting room has a white or black board, or an easel, then there is a simple technique for making a problem solving meeting effective. You can use this technique as the meeting leader or as a volunteer secretary. The approach is to write down on the board or easel just the key things needed to keep the meeting on track and to follow a logical sequence of discussion. This sequence is as follows:

1.     First get agreement from the group on the definition of the problem to be solved. If it is your meeting you should have defined the problem in your planning (see next section) and be ready to define the problem with your introduction.

2.     Gather data. In a true problem meeting this means using a tool like a fishbone diagram* to guide brainstorming on the possible causes of the problem. [*Fishbone diagrams, also called Ishikawa diagrams or cause-and-effect diagrams, are diagrams that help collect and organize the causes of a certain event. Consult Wikipedia for a more complete definition.] In a brainstorming meeting you are gathering ideas. Be open to all ideas and write each down for all to see. Make sure everyone has the opportunity to offer ideas. Gather all ideas without evaluation, i.e. make sure ideas are not critiqued in real time.

3.     After all the ideas are written down thin and organize the gathered data. This means consolidating data that is similar into one item, throwing out data that doesn’t seem relevant after brief discussion and identifying any obvious hierarchy or relationships between the remaining data items.

4.     If a fishbone diagram has been generated then prioritize the candidate causes collected so that actions can be assigned to determine if each cause is a root cause of the problem. Some causes are likely the result of other more fundamental causes. It is important to track causes back to root causes. Otherwise solutions may only correct symptoms and not the root causes. It may be that additional data is needed to identify root causes. If so, assign actions to collect the needed data, schedule a follow-up meeting to discuss the new data and close the meeting.

5.     Once root causes are identified brainstorm to collect possible solutions to the root causes if possible solutions were not collected as part of the brainstorming in step 2. Follow the same procedure as for collecting and evaluating causes.

6.     Thin and organize the alternative solutions as described in step 3.

7.     Discuss pros and cons of each alternative and make a decision on the best if sufficient information is available. If additional information is needed then assign actions to gather the information.

8.     Define the steps necessary to implement and monitor the effectiveness of selected alternatives, assign actions, schedule any necessary follow-up meetings and close the meeting.

Using a board or easel to write down relevant information at each step keeps the group on track and having the information available visually to all attendees aids their thinking. Being the recorder of information helps you guide the meeting and keep it focused. Once the members of your organization become familiar with the process outlined here the meetings tend to stay focused because they recognize that the process works and doesn’t waste their time. Whereas it is possible to use a computer and projection screen in place of a white board or easel it isn’t as effective unless the computer operator is particularly skillful in capturing and organizing data. For most people it is easier and faster to use a board or easel.

Make Sure Meetings Are Disciplined- Guidelines for Effective Meetings

The reason for most meetings is to communicate, i.e. gather or disseminate information as efficiently as possible. If meetings go beyond gathering or disseminating information then they become time wasters.  Plan your meetings, have an agenda and a time limit. Planning a meeting means thinking through each candidate item on your draft agenda and answering the following questions:

·       Does this item belong in this meeting?

·       What information must be communicated and/or gathered for each item?

·       How do I introduce each item to focus the discussion so that I get the answers I or the organization need?

·       How do I decide when this item is ready for closure?

·       How much time is it likely to take to discuss and close each item?

If you think through the questions above you can limit the items on the agenda to those that can be covered adequately in the allotted time and you are prepared to conduct an effective meeting. If you are not prepared you risk wasting everyone’s time by getting off track or onto unnecessary topics. Don’t be discouraged if this looks like it takes a lot of planning time. With practice you become proficient at this planning and find that it takes only a few minutes to plan an effective meeting.

Start meetings on time and end them on time. Make it clear that you expect to start meetings on time and do not wait for late arrivals. They soon learn that they are expected to be on time and most people do what is expected of them. If you wait for late arrivals you not only waste the time of everyone present but you condition everyone that it is not necessary to be on time for your meetings. As a result your meetings are always late in starting due to waiting for late arrivals and waste the time of those that arrive on time.

Establish intended outcomes for the meeting at the beginning and get agreement on outcomes. Make sure you have a process to capture actions. It is sufficient to identify the action and responsible person in the meeting. Hold a follow-up one on one with the actionee to discuss details, set up guidelines, due dates and what is expected at midterm and final reviews. These details are critical to ensuring that an actionee understands what is expected but they are not important to other meeting attendees.

Keep on schedule, summarize key points frequently and use group problem solving tools as appropriate. Use your judgment on the necessity of keeping and distributing minutes since the necessity depends on the type and frequency of meetings. Formal organization meetings that are scheduled monthly typically require minutes and weekly staff meetings typically do not as long as actions and other decisions are documented.

Discussing details of problem resolution and issuing detailed instructions to an actionee during meetings are just two examples that result in ineffective meetings. It is the responsibility of the meeting leader to keep the meeting focused on the agenda items. Other items will come up and it is necessary to quickly judge whether the additional item is relevant to the success of the meeting or should be dealt with at another time. Items that are not relevant can be deferred to another meeting, to a one on one, or assigned to someone to resolve outside of the meeting. Although such items must be dealt with quickly make sure you take the time to listen effectively to people bringing up items not on the agenda. They have decided, rightly or wrongly, that the items are important for the group and if you cut them off before they complete their explanation you frustrate them, and thereby demotivate them.

Exercises

1.     Develop straw man agendas for the following meetings for your organization:

1.     Weekly Staff Meeting

2.     Monthly All Hands Meeting

3.     Crisis Meeting to Address an Apparent Case of Fraud in your organization

4.     Status Meeting on a current project in your organization.

2.     Review your answers to the exercises in the middle of this lecture and assess the effectiveness of your organization’s meetings according to the guidelines covered in lecture 21.

3.     Identify any changes you need to make to improve the effectiveness of meetings in your organization.

4.     Incorporate plans for these changes in your action plan.

If you find that the pace of blog posts isn’t compatible with the pace you  would like to maintain in studying this material you can buy the book “The Manager’s Guide for Effective Leadership” at:

http://www.amazon.com/Managers-Guide-Effective-Leadership-Organizations/dp/1449000673/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1346946310&sr=8-2&keywords=Joe+Jenney

or hard copy or for nook at:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/Joe-Jenney?keyword=Joe+Jenney&store=book

or hard copy or E-book at:

http://bookstore.authorhouse.com/Products/SKU-000269270/The-Managers-Guide-for-Effective-Leadership.aspx