cazh1: on Business, Information, and Technology

Managing by letting go

Over the past months, some folks pointed out that I have a very loose management style (at times). I really like to let go of the reins, watch folks go where they want - for a while, at least.

One effective way to do this is to just say nothing in a meeting. IAPL, we had a weekly meeting with a specific tech group, supporting a major project. It was definitely a meeting for the tech side - no pretense at all of fully explaining our conversations for the few business-side folks in the room. After a while, they got used to it, but I was never sure they were completely comfortable with the somewhat contentious nature and deeply techie references of the meetings.

Sometimes I would join in (love to stir up the pot!), but more often than not, the success of the meetings depended on everyone taking a strong stand for what they wanted to see get done. We talked about data and application design, DBA and operational support policies, configuration management and testing processes - all sorts of stuff.

The key for me was to stifle any controlling impulse, and just let the conversation flow. This was a group of intelligent, experienced professionals, and it would have been counterproductive to even attempt to corral the conversation at all. However, chaos is not the way to get anything actually accomplished, so my most important role was timekeeper and decision facilitator. It's not really that difficult to stop the free-range chat, 15-20 minutes before the scheduled end of the meeting, and change the conversation to a summary of proposals / action items, and a list of assignments / next steps.

posted by James P. MacLennan at 3:19 PM | Permalink | 0 Comments