Business coaches talk about the importance of getting everyone together on the same sheet of music (which is a pretty bad cliche, if you think about it...how many orchestras only use one sheet of music? Wouldn't it get horribly crowded around that single music stand? But I digress.). It's important to understand where you want your company to go, what position you want it to occupy in broader society, what you want your employees to do and how well they should do it...all of this is critical.
But it doesn't do any good if nobody else knows about it.
In my doctoral dissertation I studied how some parts of the US military had trouble adjusting to the end of the Cold War. What I found was that very often the senior leaders knew what they wanted to do, but those grand ideas never made their way down to the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who were supposed to carry them out.
So you need to talk to your employees, not just about the "big picture" stuff but about the "little picture," too (how came no one ever uses the term "little picture?"). There are a lot of ways to do this. You can use e-mail, of course, which is a pretty proactive method that creates an "information push" rather than an "information pull" culture. There are other, less direct ways to communicate down the line through, say, company wikis or internal blogs or a discussion forum, but those might be less effective: your employees have to seek out that information (rather than having it pushed through to their desktop via e-mail) and you may also lose control of your message as others discuss and debate it. And of course, you could also just talk to people.
And this brings us to the subject of meetings.
Actually talking to people, in a somewhat structured environment rather than just a casual conversation in the hallway, has a lot of benefits. You can be sure that you convey whatever message you want, whether it's an evolution in the company's mission or the planning for a whitewater rafting trip. You're in a position to answer any questions that come up so you don't create more confusion than you're resolving. You can get immediate feedback, or provide folks an opportunity to come talk to you later after they've thought about things, just in case the idea you're presenting is, you know, dumb. And maybe, just maybe, you can have donuts.
As an added benefit, if you have employees scattered about working remotely, this is a good chance to bring them together and make sure they all get the same message, assuming you're on the same continent. If you're not, then there are plenty of web-based ways to bring folks into a virtual meeting or a teleconference, though of course time zones get to be an issue with that. I have a friend who works in Germany, with colleagues in Korea, and their headquarters is in Washington DC. The only people having their meeting during a normal time of day is the DC crowd, but in the end it's beneficial for everyone.
If you're going to bring everyone together for a meeting, there are a few things you can do to get the most out of it:
Let everyone know about it in advance Don't be one of those people who calls a last-minute meeting. Just don't. You'll be missing more people than you normally would plus you're likely to pull your employees out of a creative fog. Let them prep for it with some warning.
Have an agenda You, and everyone else, should know why you're having a meeting. This doesn't need to be overly formal, with set times for discussing each topic...just make sure everyone knows why they're there.
Have an ending time Don't let it drag on (and on and on and on...) especially if the same stuff is getting repeated. Know when it's going to end and then end it. If you need to follow up later, set a time to do that.
A lot of people trash talk the idea of meetings, and usually for good reason. But even though you don't want to interrupt your Creatives' work for the mundane task of sitting around discussing things, the reality is you need to communicate with them. Sometime, like it or not, the thing to do is just bite the bullet and call a meeting.
And seriously, do think about bringing some of those donuts.
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