Submitted by kpower1 on
in
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I am a new Director in my company. I have a simple question I am struggling with for some reason (growing pains?):
Would it be more effective for me to impose Director's Time on my manager's staff meetings to convey my thoughts/expectations etc. to each of the teams, or should I schedule my own meeting with all of my directs and skips, or should I skip these meetings altogether and try to communicate as much as possible through my directs (or via e-mail)?
In a way, I feel like using existing staff meeting time would be more efficient for the directs and skips, rather than scheduling another meeting, but part of me feels this practice might serve to undermine the authority of my directs in the eyes of my skips if I keep popping in from time to time. (And I remember Mike and Mark saying over and over again that efficient does not equal effective.)
I feel like I want and need direct communication with my skips, but how do I balance this need with the need to delegate some of these responsibilities?
Hope this makes sense.
There's a cast for that!(TM)
There's a skip level meeting cast (http://www.manager-tools.com/2006/04/skip-levels) that covers how you should communicate with your skip levels. In a cast I listened to recently (I think it was the "Routine Town Hall" cast), Mark was scathing of the idea of your boss taking time out of your town hall meeting to "address the troops", and I feel that the arguments made in that cast would apply to a weekly staff meeting, too.
If you want things to be communicated to your skips, communicate them to the managers under you. They're in a better position to "tune" your message to the recipients, and add their bit of "and this is what it means to us". Make it a task that they have to report back to you on when complete.
And yet another cast to listen to
Some many gems on this site.
Check this one out. We communicate through our managers, not for them.
http://www.manager-tools.com/2010/12/managers-are-communicated-through