I don't know if you've read Stephen Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I think it's sold a gazillion of them already so you've probably at least seen one somewhere. Being in the airport a lot, and also being involved with the day-to-day management of a research group and also a research consortium, I do admit that I read a whole bunch of these sort of self-help books. Is there anything inside them worth reading? Certainly. Although the number of nuggets you can get from these books is definitely not proportional to how many pages there are. And I realize that it's more about where you are at in your career, than what is written down by the expert as the "expert advice."
Like all academic centers, the Media Lab has an internal survey regarding the efficacy of research advisors like myself. I can't say that I do tremendously better than the average, but I generally do not fall at the bottom of the curve. I find these sorts of data somewhat useful as a point of reflection. Again, it's not what is written down as the evaluation, I find it more useful to reflect as to where you are at.
One of the keys to being a good manager has to be the art of running a good meeting. I learned this when I was a summer student at Texas Instruments. One summer I was assigned to a group where the ceremonial "hour long" group meeting often ran past two hours. Usually the meeting was spent with people bickering about minor things, or else with random conflagrations of self-assertion of the flavor, "I'm right. You're not." And then all h*ll breaks loose. I guess it was similar to the way a professional sportsgame is played today. Then, one summer I was assigned to probably the best group at TI. It was incredible. The one hour meeting actually lasted for one hour. Just this difference alone seemed to make for a better group. I took this heuristic to heart.
Years later, I took the opportunity to ask my research team as to what might be the keys to a successful group meeting. Mind you, at MIT we are in the business of being as cutting-edge creative as possible versus coordinating specific deadlines regarding projects so I'm not certain that the knowledge here is general. I've been in real meetings myself, so I know that we can't always live in a daintily painted rose-colored shed of freeflowing thought. However, I do believe that everyone desires to feel creative, so thus I take the liberty to paint an ideal picture here that many might find at least a teeny bit of utility.
1) Have specific things to decide upon, and then make those decisions on the spot. This creates a specific and tangible deliverable from everyone's one hour investment in time.
2) Have an open discussion that gets unforeseen issues on the table. Everyone should have the opportunity to talk, otherwise the group dynamic will eventually fail. There's too many good ideas in a crowd of people to not capitalize upon by listening to only the loudest mouth.
3) Have a motivational topic to discuss that gets adrenaline going. Perhaps the topic can be about where your team is heading and about the incredible implications of the work that they are doing. Whether fact or fiction-to-become-fact, it's good to know that you're doing the right thing. People should leave the meeting feeling psyched.
4) End on time. I call this the Ping Yang Rule. If people trust that you will end on time, nobody will fidget as a means to coerce you to ending on time. The group's wa remains intact. I think if you can't get 1, 2, or 3, at least get this one right and people will come back to your meetings in the future.
And now, no joke ... I have to go to a meeting.
Posted by maeda at July 27, 2005 10:39 AM