Since a company's practices, culture, and values set the tone for interactions within the organization, a development manager's success depends on her ability to work effectively within the company's culture and also her ability to influence it. Conversely, a manager whose style is contrary to company culture and practices will encounter friction with other managers and other employees.
To understand a company's culture and practices, the new manager must first inquire about it and then observe what behaviors actually occur in the workplace. If you focus on the following five areas, you can develop a good sense of your company's culture and practices:
Ask how decisions are made.
Observe how people reach agreements.
Understand how meetings are conducted.
Know how people problems are resolved.
See what behaviors get rewarded.
As a manager, you can also influence your company's culture and practices by actively promoting new practices among fellow managers and modeling appropriate examples. Cultures and practices can shift in small companies as they grow and develop, providing opportunities for change and improvement. If your CEO wants to improve corporate culture, your influence can motivate changes as the company grows.
Company culture and practices refer to the shared understanding of how employees behave in a company and how they interact with one another and with management. A growing company's culture helps define the company and makes it unique. If a culture is easily identifiable and projects itself in a positive light, prospective employees will be attracted to the company and current employees will be more likely to stay with the firm. From a purely financial standpoint, a positive culture adds value to a company. From a people standpoint, a positive culture makes working for the company an enjoyable experience.
In a small growing company, a culture can form on its own, without any particular guidance from employees or management. However, this often results in a culture that reflects the values and practices of top management, whether explicit or not. Company culture reflects what management rewards and encourages in employee behavior, and employees usually follow management's lead or decide to leave.
You want first and foremost to promote a culture of trust and collaboration, in which individuals are encouraged to share information and perform at a high level with the expectation that management will support them in their endeavors. If employees know that they will be treated fairly and they feel secure about their jobs, a culture of trust grows. Employees don't worry about losing their jobs for political reasons. When conflicts occur, employees handle their problems first with the individuals involved and not through email blasts to management.
More important, in a healthy culture, the overall focus is on company success, rather than individual success. Employees are willing to take reasonable risks and stretch their abilities on a project because doing so is in everyone's best interest. Also of benefit is a focus on long-term as well as short-term efforts. A long-term investment in productivity at the expense of short-term results might make sense, but that approach won't work in an environment that lacks trust.
Contrast a culture of trust with a culture of distrust: Employees greet mistakes and failures by blaming others, politics are prevalent, and management fires people for reasons other than performance and finances. Employees work to pull themselves up by pushing others down. Their behaviors are driven by the fear of losing their jobs because they have seen it happen to others. They focus their efforts on never failing, and they don't take reasonable risks if those risks could lead to failure. In a culture of distrust, management punishes people for making mistakes.
Knowing a company's culture before accepting a job there will protect you from a major mismatch down the line. Unfortunately, companies do not always characterize themselves clearly during interviews. Getting an accurate picture of a company's culture can require that you work there for a while if you aren't able to get details from a person you trust.
To encourage a positive culture in your team and your company, think about how you interact with members of your team, and make sure you are building positive relationships with them. If you support a culture based on trust and collaboration, your team will be stronger and will benefit from higher productivity, your company will retain the best employees, and everyone will be happier.
Corporate style concerns the general manner in which employees interact with one another. Interaction styles vary across companies and sometimes across departments in larger companies. Styles of interactions you might experience include highly confrontational, highly political, low confrontational but aggressive (passive-aggressive), and highly collaborative. Some companies encourage confrontation for all issues and have resolution methods or processes in place. Others encourage collaboration and almost no confrontation.
Management style is a subset of corporate culture. Management styles vary considerably from company to company, not to mention from boss to boss. It usually boils down to how management makes decisions and who in management makes the decisions. Some managers focus on details, while others focus on the big picture. Detail managers focus on knowing every detail of the staff members' activities. In contrast, big picture managers keep their eye on the overview and do not want to know details. It's also common to see strict hierarchical management and diffused decision-making management. A strict hierarchical manager focuses on giving directions to people and making most decisions higher in the management chain. With diffused decision-making management, managers allow team members to make most of the decisions.
CEOs often hire managers and staff whose styles and values are similar to their own. This does not necessarily result in uniformity of management style, but a CEO can effectively create a consensus-type management style. That style tends to propagate down in a growing organization because of the continuous hiring requirements in a small company.
Knowing the management style will allow you to understand how best to drive forward your ideas and important efforts. Matching your interaction style with that of the company will lead to greater success. However, if you are not comfortable with your company's style, do not try to emulate it. A significant mismatch in style can be a good reason to look elsewhere for a new position. As you consider a new employer, look carefully at the corporate culture and management style before accepting a position.
Meeting style refers to the way teams of people organize their discussions and decision processes. Small company management typically does not define meeting style, which tends to evolve as the company grows.
When a company is tiny, with 12 or fewer employees, all of the employees communicate continually and most are up to date with events, agendas, and important decisions made by the company. Conversations are informal with few preset meeting times, agendas, or lists of invitees, while formal meetings are usually rare or nonexistent.
As a company grows to about 50 employees, it transitions to a point at which formal meetings seem to develop a life of their own. The number of potential two-way conversations increases exponentially—so, for example, a company of 5 people has 10 different two-way conversations possible, but a company of 50 people has more than 1,000 different two-way conversations possible. As a company grows, it becomes impossible for every employee to know every other employee well—which was possible when the company was still tiny in size.
Company management usually responds to growth by compartmentalizing functions. This ensures that not everyone needs to talk to everyone else in the company. Most employees communicate with people who work in their functional area and in some restricted way to people in other teams.
Invariably, the transition from a tiny company to a small growing company results in an explosion of meetings. Many small companies develop a culture of too many formal meetings: Management sets up regularly scheduled status meetings, one-on-one meetings, company meetings, technology meetings, and team meetings. With so many meetings to attend, a manager has little time to do his work or interact with his teams. If more than half of each day is devoted to meetings, the only way a manager can interact with his team members is to … set up a meeting.
Formal meetings are not a bad thing, unless too many meetings are scheduled. They are not always an effective use of people's time and can slow down progress in a growing company. Many bad practices are brought into meetings by people who missed meeting training. Many formal meetings are a waste of people's time because too many participants attend, no agenda is offered, no conclusions are reached, no action items are recorded, meeting members are allowed to pontificate, and meetings are scheduled when an email or hallway conversation would be more effective.
A management day chock-full of formal meetings leaves little time for other activities such as getting your work done, talking with team members at their desks, impromptu hallway conversations, and problem solving. Spending the day running from meeting to meeting also drains your enthusiasm. You might respond to excessive formal meetings by spending your nights getting your own work done, not getting key work done, skipping meetings without explanation, pushing back on meetings, and blocking out time on your schedule so that you can't be added to another meeting roster.
To reduce excessive company meetings, you will need to discuss and advocate for the changes to gain the support of your boss and peers. The CEO and other managers might have open ears to suggestions about improving efficiency, because, like you, they probably have too many meetings crammed into too little time. You can also collaborate and share ideas with peer managers about how to make meetings more efficient. Actively define best practices for meetings to keep them from becoming the dominant time-waster of everyone's day. Illustrating best practices in the meetings you chair can influence others as well. In all cases, avoid lecturing others about poor practices.
Solving the "too many formal meetings" problem requires collective cultural action. An "all-day meeting" culture might survive in a large company, but in a small growing company, this culture saps employee vitality.
Creating an effective meeting culture can require a shift in company practices as the company grows. Your company should provide annual training for employees on running effective meetings. A good course will cover how to run an efficient and useful meeting, how to choose attendees, and when to use other means of communication instead of calling a meeting. If management properly calibrates employees' attitudes, employees will respond honestly if you ask whether a meeting is necessary.
Several general principles can be followed in setting up a meeting:
Define a clear purpose. Define a purpose and the desired results before calling the meeting. In the purpose definition, include your thoughts about the results of the meeting and define the type of meeting you seek. Common meeting types are information presentation, data-collection, and decision-making. At an information presentation meeting, you present information you want the attendees to know. At a data-collection meeting, you try to collect information about a problem as a group. At a decision-making meeting, you discuss a problem and come to a decision about how to handle it.
Choose attendees. Choose the minimum number of attendees, limiting the list only to those who can contribute. You can inform others later of information they need to know in an email or in meeting minutes.
Create an agenda. Before the meeting, define and distribute an agenda that describes the main points you want to discuss so that people come prepared.
Distribute clear invitations. Define a location, date, and time for the meeting and let people know these details well in advance. Make sure that they consent to their participation, and do not assume their availability.
Start on time. Encourage a culture of starting meetings on time or no more than five minutes late, even if some of the participants are not present when the meeting starts. This will avoid wasting time waiting for tardy participants. If meetings always seem to start late, attendees will show up late.
Leave gaps in the schedule. It is difficult to start a meeting on time when it is scheduled back-to-back with other meetings. Leave a 15- or 30-minute gap between your meeting and the last meeting on each participant's calendar whenever possible. This will allow everyone a short but much-needed break and avoid delays in starting your meeting.
Follow these general principles for running an effective meeting:
Designate a moderator to run the meeting.
Designate someone to capture information and keep minutes as needed.
Stick to the agenda. If meeting members stray to other topics, stop the discussion for a moment. Agree on a place in the agenda to discuss new items or whether attendees should discuss new items in another meeting.
Manage the meeting time as you discuss topics. Large meetings are expensive for small firms. Consider the cost of the meeting time, preparation time, and the inefficiencies of breaking up people's days with another meeting.
The meeting can cover the statuses of earlier action items. For ad hoc meetings, assign a "customer" for the action item who will follow the item and judge its success. This will often be you by default, but it doesn't need to be.
At the end of the meeting, review action items and ensure that they are recorded in an identified location. A standard location can be used for distributing meeting minutes.
After the meeting, ask participants about the value of the meeting so that you can make improvements for the next meeting. Do not take suggestions personally.
Learning how to be effective at meetings takes repeated training and effort. Time spent on this effort will pay off in improved productivity and morale. Employees do not find work rewarding when they can't do their jobs because they must attend too many meetings.