Books about bosses there are a few. They run between the technical, the psychiatric and the jocular and, sometimes, happily contain noteworthy findings. Robert I. Sutton, Professor of Administration Sciences at the highly celebrated Stanford University, belongs to the bestselling club thanks to a varied arsenal of essays on hierarchies, stratagems to promote a couple of positions, organizational catastrophes and antidotes against the manager botfly. The most insufferable among the idiotic leaders, Sutton warns, take power because the rest is unable to stop their feet in time. They are the presidents of this football team, of that political party or even of an IBEX 35 company and they should be located and guillotined because they poison the atmosphere and compromise the viability of the companies. Among the classic manias of the paradigmatic leader, the one of the meeting stands out, a substantive that the RAE analyzes , as so many other times, from the root vero "gather", whose three meanings clearly reveal the immensity of the problem.
First meaning: rejoin. The malicious observer will immediately put his finger on the sore: it is only possible to re-unite what is broken or washed away, often fatal circumstances for any public or private institution.
Second meaning: to gather, to congregate, to pile up. Words that inexorably refer to disorder or chaos and that reveal murmurs, clicks, disgust and discomfort.
Third meaning: gather certain things to collect them or for any other purpose. In this passage the SAR reaches and exceeds the excellence of irony, because there is no better image of futility than a set of subordinates exposed to the inclemency of the agenda, the mood swings of the summoner and the threat of an eternal conclave.
REUNIOLOGY
Although it seems a simple, insufferable and inevitable ritual, Professor, researcher and consultant Steven G. Rogelberg, a kind of Sutton epigone, proposes a battery of advice, statistics and resources to turn vice into virtue. The amazing science of meetings (Tébar Flores, 2019) is a title held by the Washington Post where our academic gathers more than 5,000 surveys of professionals from different industries with the idea of creating a good meeting , which on paper It is still an instrument to improve the performance of a collective. Of course, Rogelberg is positioned. Meeting is very good as long as it is not about inefficient and oversized events. In his report, the American warns of the predominant mechanism: the higher the position, the greater the time invested in meetings. This truth includes another: time translates into money. In the United States alone, Rogelberg estimates, companies leave 1.4 billion a year in reunionitis.
A senior executive of a pharmacist thus justifies in an article for Harvard Business Review the validity of the meeting. "I think the large number of meetings held in our company is the cultural tax we pay for the inclusive learning environment that we want to encourage. If the alternative to more meetings is more autocratic decision-making, fewer contributions from all levels within the organization and fewer opportunities to ensure identification with the company and communication through personal interaction, so give me more meetings at any time. "
Rogelberg gets in the car immediately. "Meetings," he says, "help employees connect, express their opinions, address problems and create a shared understanding. Instead of eliminating them, we must improve them by applying what we know about the science of meetings." Let us then coax a new term that shadows reunionitis: reuniology.
According to this discipline, there is a principle of pride that permeates everything: the leader is likely to lead worse than he thinks. "The evidence shows that we overestimate our abilities. Accepting this reality is key to improvement. How do others act in meetings? Are there parallel conversations? Do some speak on the phone? It is convenient to adopt a service leadership and a server mentality to maximize collective talent, "suggests the professor.
Luis Pérez Capitán, former director of human resources in Correos and labor relations in Iberia and currently director of the study service of the UGT confederation, complements this perspective: "Meetings can be eliminated or spaced if they are worthless. from a space of confrontation of ideas, they contribute to the streamlining of companies, cooperation and leadership whenever they are used correctly.A good boss has to flee as a soul that leads the devil from diffuse meetings; the issues have to be clear and people should be allowed to express themselves with education and freedom and then make the appropriate decisions. "
Parkinson's Law, enunciated in 1955 by The Economist, determines that the work expands to the maximum possible time for its execution, that is, that "if a retired elderly woman has one day, she can spend the entire time writing and sending a postcard it will take an hour for her niece to choose the postcard, another to locate the glasses, half an hour to find the address, an hour and a quarter to write, and 20 minutes to decide if it is convenient to bring an umbrella to go to the mailbox on the street side. The same effort will take a busy person three minutes. "
Reuniology fights this universal phenomenon with heterodox measures, for example, an unusual duration (the 48 minutes of Rogelberg) that forces the assistant to memorize a less round number, or lighten the usual meetings (from 30 minutes to 25) to generate a pressure added synthesis and concentration, or promote huddles or micro-meetings, where punctuality is sacred because it involves small pieces embedded in the middle of other tasks whose course will not stop.
STEP BY STEP
No meeting comes to fruition without a meticulously calculated agenda. Nothing to copy and paste documents from last month by changing only the date; No calls with no objective. The leader can ask attendees for suggestions on the issues to be discussed, thus increasing their commitment, adapting the uses of time to the circumstances, alternating the allocation of seats and even encouraging ride meetings. A fundamental element will be the waterfall effect, which Pérez Capitán considers a backbone. "The immediate superior [who attends the conclave] has to share the agenda and his knowledge with the rest of the team and must get his opinion. The worker likes to feel consulted because the human being is a communicator and prefers to articulate their relationships more from participation than from the hierarchy. "
This transversality leads us to the thorny alley of the influx. What is the ideal number of attendees? "Although it may seem that the more crowded the meetings, the more effective they will be because of the amount of ideas, resources and intellectual capacity overturned, the research reveals the opposite. Having too many attendees means having too many voices, taking on greater logistical challenges and facing the social laziness, "argues Rogelberg. The lazy man deserves a small portrait of a larist or Galdosian from the findings of the book, or perhaps a reference to Mariano Rajoy, since this specimen is a strong supporter of the worse, the better; is far from the action, convulsively reviews WhatsApp messages and jokes with the partner next door about the new style of the financial officer or the impossible tie of the head of marketing.
POP SPACE
Emotions, Rogelberg emphasizes, are contagious, and this is how reuniology uncovers its friendlier (and naive) face. To improve the environment, the leader will greet the attendees one by one, play music and offer food. Mobile phones, tablets and laptops will be prohibited. There will be a chapter of thanks at the beginning of the intervention. Role play and even stretching will be allowed on time. And silence will be used as a method. "One technique to incorporate silence into meetings is the brainstorm of written ideas (write ideas on a topic in silence before sharing them)." This rain will respond to a question previously formulated by the chief and will trigger a debate and a vote, although in such a case a principle as capital of this science is compromised as the duration, the main antidote against the tostón meeting.
Rogelberg's last commandment constitutes at least a dubious epilogue. "Even with sophisticated technology, the meeting is still essentially composed of work-related interactions that occur between two or more people more formally than a simple talk, but less than a speech." Although the teacher mainly denounces telephone encounters, it is hard to imagine a hyperpresencial world when all trends point in the opposite direction (there are digital nomads, youtubers, the Udemy platform). "Every time you lose less in the telematic meeting because the audiovisual field is very successful. It is true that we relate through gestures and looks, but sometimes physical meetings involve a brutal investment in time," says Pérez Capitán.
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