Meetings, remote employees, and constructive feedback

- The fifth takeaway is directors must run efficient meetings, work well with remote employees, and provide constructive feedback. Meetings aren't popular, but they do offer opportunities to address problems and handle rumors and gossip. Well-run meetings feature healthy discussion and debate about 95% of the time. Allocate someone as a meeting runner who will organize the session, set the agenda and manage the meeting's flow. Assign a second person as a meeting historian to keep the minutes and followup afterward. The meeting historian should capture everything and distribute the minutes to everyone in the company. This helps prevent the spread of gossip. For meetings that don't occur on a regular schedule, directors should use a three-point agenda. A first item is a minimal metric story. Minimal metrics are whatever the team measures regularly, revenue, application performance, security incidents, and the like. The second item is rolling team sourced topics. These are agenda items that team members added at the end of a previous meeting to slate them to be addressed at the next meeting, and the third item is gossip, rumors and lies. Give your employees a safe space to discuss issues and find out facts. This is especially important if the team or the company is going through a transition period with the potential for confusion and concern. Today, many employees work remotely and companies use high-tech video and audio conferencing equipment to conduct meetings. Many companies use the term remote to describe employees who work off site, that is from home. However, distributed turns out to be a better term because it means elsewhere rather than far from center, as remote implies. Regardless of terminology, realize that offsite employees suffer a professional disadvantage. Never let them feel that their contributions don't matter. Distributed meetings are hard to run compared to meetings when everyone is present, but give your distributed meetings and your distant team members the same attention and care that they would receive in person at an onsite meeting. Compliments go a long way. Recognize how someone accomplished an achievement, whether it's large or small. On the flip side, saying the hard thing is just as important as giving compliments. Managers often ignore that voice inside their head calling out potential future problems because they want to avoid confrontation. Constructive feedback falls into three categories, no big deal, slow burn, and just plain hard feedback. With the first category, the person accepts the feedback and moves on. Ideally, all feedback would fall into this bucket. Slow burn feedback feels like it should not be a big deal until it hits the person later on that they received important information. Difficult feedback is hard to hear because the human brain is wired to fight it. Listen carefully to hard feedback so you understand it, and repeat it back for clarification. Taking that step is calming and helps the guidance sink in.