Four Management Tools: Meetings, Reports, Delegation, and a Stop-Doing List

Management Tools—Meetings Management thinker Fredmund Malik found that most senior executives spend over 60% of each day in meetings, yet feel over 60% of those meetings are inefficient and unproductive. He recommends fewer meetings as the key to greater efficiency. Avoid a meeting if possible. One sign of a good team is its ability to minimize the need to meet. For unavoidable meetings, the key lies before and after, not only during. Most people reserve time for meetings; better managers also reserve dedicated preparation and follow-up time. Use it to control the agenda, the key to efficiency and staying on track. Poor meetings often have agenda problems. Participants may discover the topic only on arrival, wasting time on background and remaining superficial because they have not thought deeply. Alternatively, discussion drifts into casual conversation. Both waste time. Set the key questions beforehand. Make time to consult important participants, hear their ideas and requirements, and send materials early rather than at the last minute. Organizers also need preparation time focused on the agenda. Decide beforehand which issues can be resolved in one meeting and which require enough time and repeated discussion to find a solution. Reserve follow-up time because execution is the weak link in most organizations. Good discussion achieves nothing if little is done. Ensure topics become action. As discussion concludes, begin assigning responsibilities and planning implementation. --- Management Tools—Reports What is a report’s real benefit? Readers save time compared with an oral presentation. Writers are forced to think through the act of writing. Many companies fail to realize that value. Managers may demand a rigid format for formality’s sake, producing stock phrases that reduce communication efficiency. Writers may collect company, industry, and market data to make a report comprehensive, then combine it all. The mountain of detail consumes time. If the deadline arrives without a good solution, they categorize the materials under broad headings such as findings, conclusions, and recommendations, adding data and charts. It looks substantial but does little to solve the problem: breadth of information substitutes for depth of thought. ----- Management Tools—Job Descriptions and Delegation Job descriptions define what a position should do; delegation determines what subordinates should do now. Malik asks managers to list their most capable subordinates and strengths. The list is usually short—three to five people: Wang excels in marketing, Li in research and development, Zhang in training newcomers. Then call and ask what they are actually doing at that moment. Managers usually return looking unhappy. Eight or nine times out of ten, their best employees are handling immediate trivialities, not planning the next campaign, developing the next flagship product, or cultivating new talent. Malik asks: if your strongest people are not working for the company’s future, who is? Must the best people handle these minor matters? Could others deal with them, freeing outstanding employees to concentrate on genuinely important problems? Defining a position’s work is hard; ensuring someone spends time on the most important tasks is harder. Managers must first see priorities clearly, then actively relieve excellent employees of everyday burdens so they can focus. This also applies to self-management. List your most important work and periodically compare it with current tasks. Are you spending more time on what matters? ----- Management Tools—Systematic Organizational Cleanup How do you subtract systematically? Ask regularly: which current activities would we not start now if we had not already begun them? This does not ask what should never have been started, but what has fulfilled its historical purpose and continues through inertia. That inertia-driven work is what Malik calls ‘garbage.’ A form, report, branch, or business unit may survive solely through habit, no longer serving a purpose. Asking only what else to do, without asking what to stop, makes the company’s burden heavier and slows it down. Malik recommends reserving a whole day annually with your most valued subordinates to identify this garbage. Alongside next year’s priorities, list the work to terminate. Abandon obsolete activities and routines, discard burdens, and renew the organization to keep it energetic. ---- Management tools help managers concentrate on what matters. ‘Focus is the essence of execution and a firm foundation for success.’ #Dedao management audio summary