Next up, a non-fiction book: The Leadership Challenge. This is one that I read back when I was an assistant manager at Hastings. I enjoyed it enough to keep the book around and decided that now that I am in a leadership position again, I should read through it again. As a general rule, I dislike management how-to books. I find them trite and somewhat insulting as a reader and as an employee. This one, however, has a number of redeeming qualities and ranks up there with Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
Speaking of leadership, I ran my first Account Representative meeting today at work. We actually haven't had one for nearly half a year, so there was a lot of information to cover. Now for a bit of background: In the past, those meetings have generally been nothing more than complaint fests. They were long, drawn-out, irritating, and generally pointless. Today, however, I had 20 things that needed to be covered and only 60 minutes to do it in. That averages to about 3 minutes per topic. I started the meeting exactly on time - before everyone showed up (including my co-lead).
That made some people angry.
I told everyone that we wouldn't be discussing "what if" scenarios and if they had something they wanted to say, they need to get to the point quickly without any long stories.
That made some people angry.
The first question asked started with "But what if..." They didn't get any further because I interrupted them and repeated that we didn't have the time to go over every possible "what if".
That made one person really angry.
I apologized in advance for the fact that a lot of the information in the meeting was only going to be going one way (me to them), but that future meetings would be much more of a two-way dialogue.
The first part made some people angry.
I proceeded to work through the topics. After each one, I paused and asked for any comments. When the comments threatened to drag on forever or when people started re-hashing points that have already been made, I stopped the discussion, asked them to email me any remaining questions and I would answer them then, and moved on to the next topic.
That made some people angry.
While going over some topics, I noticed several people furiously scribbling notes about the changes and/or things that I asked them to be aware of.
That made me happy.
I conveyed all the information that I needed to with five minutes to spare. I thanked everyone for their patience and reiterated that future meetings (scheduled every two weeks) would have more give and take and they would have more opportunity to voice their opinions. I then adjourned the meeting.
That made several people give me sour faces and one to proclaim: "I felt like I've been puked on for the past hour."
After everyone left, my co-lead and I sat in the room in silence for a few minutes. He then turned to me and said, "Welcome to my world."
