The Meeting That Let Me Believe I Was Managing
I had a weekly status meeting about my tax team for 2 years, and it never once told me how anyone was doing.
A manager I coach spent about 18 months running a recurring meeting with his team that he had come to dread. He would feel it coming a few days out. He ran it anyway, because cancelling it felt like admitting something.
Eventually he did cancel it, less as a decision than as a drift. 4 or 5 months went by and nobody asked where it had gone.
Then he rebuilt it. He put real work into that and came back with an agenda of 6 topics he wanted to cover. In the first meeting they got through 2.
That is when I asked him what he got out of that meeting that he could not get anywhere else.
He did not have an answer. He sat with it a while, and what came back had nothing to do with the agenda. He had rebuilt the meeting because he believed a manager should have one, and he had never asked the people in it what they wanted from it.
I recognized it faster than I would like to admit, because I ran my own version for about 2 years.
I was head of tax at a public company. Most of the group reported to my senior manager, and she and I met for 30 minutes every week. She would walk me through what the team was working on and where things stood, then bring me whatever she needed help with, and I would help.
It was a good meeting. Useful, and never cancelled. I could have pointed at it on my calendar as evidence I was managing.
It told me where the work stood. What was happening to the people doing it never came up.
I could not have told you, in a given month, which of my people was stretched past what they could carry or had started looking. I learned those things late, when I learned them at all.
The part I find harder is that it looked like the opposite of neglect. I had a weekly meeting on the calendar and I kept it. What I had was a status meeting. The only recurring conversation I had about my people was built around work that was already finished, and status is all a status meeting can carry.
There is a reason these meetings drift that way. Status is the easiest thing in the room to talk about. It fills 30 minutes without anybody having to be uncomfortable, and at the end of it you both feel like you did your jobs.
If I had that meeting back, I would ask her one thing. What would make this 30 minutes something you would not want to miss?
I think the answer would have changed the meeting. I think it would also have told me something about her that the status update was never going to… but I never asked.
The manager I coach did ask. The meetings run shorter now, and he is closer to what his team is carrying than the old version ever let him be. They feel better supported for it.
What would your team say if you asked them what would make your 1:1 worth protecting?
Greg Crossan spent 30 years in corporate tax, most recently as Global Tax Director at Bose. He’s now an executive coach for tax and accounting leaders, working with them one-to-one and inside the organizations that employ them. More on his one-on-one coaching.