Your Millenials

There's a perception out there of Creatives as young 20-somethings with tattoos and piercings, more likely to be carrying an iPod than a Blackberry, and apparently functioning without that little part of the brain that says "oooh, you might want to wait before you say that." Not every Creative is like that, of course. But enough of them are that you should learn how to manage that group known as Millenials.

Whether you call them "Millenials," "Gen Y," or "those kids born between 1977 and 1995 who make me a bunch of money," you need to learn a little about what they're like and how they work. And work they do...they have been called slackers by those who don't know better, but I beg to differ. When I was in grad school at the end of the 90s and early 00s these folks were my undergraduate colleagues. After I graduated and went on to teach college, they were my students. Now, they are, in some ways, my role models.

Fortune magazine last year published a really good article on managing this group of workers. I had picked up the magazine in an airport on my way to Afghanistan and read the article 3 times during the first 2 weeks I was there. What I found useful about the article wasn't just the description of common character traits but more the reasons those traits developed. That helps me adjust my interaction with younger workers. Now of course, I realize these are generalizations and every individual is different, so it's important to tailor your style as needed, but this overview offers a pretty good starting point for understanding your younger Creatives.

So here are a few things to consider, though by no means an exhaustive list, no consider about your Millenials:

They set high standards.
Millenials seem to expect a lot. That's because they do. They are looking for colleagues and a work environment that will challenge them. They expect their company to take care of them. They expect to gain responsibilities concurrent with improving their skills. And they set their highest expectations for...themselves. Since they were kids they have been highly competitive, not just in rough-and-tough, take-no-prisoners world of youth soccer, but also in a world of Advanced Placement courses and high school classmates starting their own businesses. Their heroes aren't Henry Ford but instead Mark Zuckerberg (he founded Facebook while a student at harvard, in case you're too embarrassed to ask who he is). They have seen what is possible and will push themselves, and expect others around them to meet the same standards.

They are info savvy.
They grew up with computers and saw the birth of the Web, unlike the Baby Boomers and Gen-X'ers they are replacing who had to adapt when they were older. They know the answer to every question is out there and they expect it to be available. So if you tell them to do something they may well ask "why?," not to be a smart-ass (well, not only for that reason) but because they are used to knowing more than just the basics. You should expect probing questions during presentations because they think they can find the answer and so they assume others should be doing their homework, too. And they will get answers for you from non-traditional places...in grad school I once heard an undergrad say "this is the first time I've ever been in the library," even though she'd obviously been around campus at least a couple years. She's just used to being able to find what she wants from the desk in her room rather than a study carrell in the library stacks. Watch out for a potential problem here: they may not be as good as they should be at weeding out fact from opinion or good info from bad.

They may still be living at home.
This generation has an interesting tendency to move back home after college, and many stay for a while. Part of this may be due to those pesky student loans they are paying off, while some of it may be due to the protective bubble their parents built around then when they were younger and which never went away. This has a couple implications for them in the workplace. First, they may not have faced many of the real world requirements like finding and maintaining a home, cooking and grocery shopping, paying for utilities, and other things that many of us take for granted in our daily lives. So it is possible they may not have learned as much about individual responsibility as one might expect. Second, just as their parents were probably involved in their education when they were younger, so too might they be involved in their work now that they're older. When they go home and complain about you, you just might get a call from their parents. These are people who never outgrew the whole "yelling at the Little League umpire" thing (and yes, I was a Little League umpire one summer in college, and yes, I'm still bitter) so just as your Creative may have a thing or two to learn, so too might their parents.

Diversity is normal for them.
When I lived in Colorado a few years back a group there produced bumper stickers that read "Celebrate Diversity." Millenials don't necessarily celebrate it because many of them grew up with it as a natural state and have trouble imagining anything different. They think nothing of working with people from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds or who are here from other countries. They are more likely to have gay friends and many, even straight people, will look for nondiscrimination policies and domestic partner benefits even if they don't apply to them, just to get a feel for your company's culture. If you have a non-diverse environment they are likely to wonder why, so while you should avoid quotas you might also want to ensure you recruit in a way that attracts skilled people from all backgrounds.

They are not afraid to talk to you.
When I was teaching college I was a little surprised by the change in the professor-student relationship from my days as a student. They were more active in class than we had been and, more importantly, they were more inclined to challenge things I said in class. I thought this was great, assuming they put some thought into their challenges, but it caught me off guard at first. What I realized was that, whereas my peers pretty much accepted our professors' authority in the subject, my students were less inclined to put blind faith in a professor, or any authority figure, and instead were more inclined to engage them. One suggestion for why this is the case is the state of American politics during the 1990s and into the 2000s, which turned incredibly partisan in a public way and which saw many people in authority caught up in scandals or in other behavior that led people to see that just because someone's reached a certain position doesn't automatically mean they deserve reverence. Another possibility is that they've been told how great they are through positive reinforcement their whole lives and they now assume that everyone's as interested in their opinion as they are. You should take advantage of this openness, since many good ideas can come out of this process, while also teaching your Millenials about a little something called "tact" and something else called "keeping your mouth shut sometimes."

They multitask. Constantly.
Seriously. Just because they're on the phone while surfing the Web and listening to their iPod doesn't mean they aren't working. They might be turning out some really incredible work with all that stimulation. Hopefully.

Like I said, these are generalizations and many Millenials won't fit these nice, neat descriptions. But hopefully this gives you some idea how they function and why so you can manage your firm in such a way as to get the best possible work out of them.

IT Should Empower Workers

A recent presentation by Bill Gates, highlighted in a Wall Street Journal blog, suggested that leaders haven't done enough to empower their workers. The point was made that up until now most business software was designed to help managers track information more than to help workers better use information. The Journal blog reported that

Gates said that the next wave of productivity will come from technology aimed at making information available to workers and helping them communicate.

What he's getting at here, to a large degree, is technology to support collaboration. This is obviously useful if you use telework as a business practice, particularly when workers are scattered around the world, but it's also useful even if you're in the same office.

Gates gave a demonstration of Sharepoint, a useful collaboration tool produced, of course, by Microsoft. Now, I've been in an organization using Sharepoint and we had a lot of trouble getting it to work properly. One thing to keep in mind is that a new system like this is likely to require an investment in training...otherwise, you're just buying a bunch of software that will sit there unused.

Google Docs offers another opportunity to make information available for real collaboration, not just review. I've been involved with some non-profit groups using Google Docs to send around proposed bylaws, collect information for a race, and review and submit budget information. We are scattered around the DC area so trying to meet up in person wasn't feasible, and the single point of contact had better things to do than deal with 40 separate e-mail trails.

Getting these tools is easy enough; getting people to use them is another matter. At a recent government offsite, in a discussion about internal communication, I heard a number of older managers (sorry to be ageist, but they've all ben around a while) say that they wanted hard copies passed around the office. When told that they could simply print out an attachment or e-mail if they want a hard copy, one manager said "I don't want to have to hit the print button every time I want something!" Okaaaaayyyyyyyy...how do you deal with that? To some extent, you can train people and allow them to see the benefits emerge during their training. But really, the best way to encourage acceptance of new IT tools is to introduce new ideas one at a time, but consistently, thus helping create a culture where new methods are the norm. Trying to institute a wholesale change at once is typically a non-starter...going from a "read file" full of paper copies of things people should be reading to a Sharepoint system is simply not going to cut it. "IT acceptance" is as much a part of your organization's culture as any other value.

We are starting to see more and more IT tools that encourage, rather than discourage, collaboration. We hope that our Creatives will be open to new ways of doing things but the default response to change is typically "no." The truth is, most workers will say they want to be empowered but when it actually happens it makes them nervous. Addressing that is more of a cultural issue than a technological one, but now that the technology is coming into play, successful firms need to make the cultural shift toward acceptance.

Get 'em Ready...Again

Apparently, the need to start employees off right isn't confined to our creative fields and private firms. Even the federal government is beginning to realize the importance of setting a good tone for new employees, as seen in an article that first appeared here earlier this month.

Agencies Need Better Welcome Wagon for New Employees, Report Says
By Alyssa Rosenberg

Federal agencies should improve their approach to bringing new employees onboard and integrating them into the workplace culture if they want to boost retention rates and productivity, the Partnership for Public Service and Booz Allen Hamilton said in a report released on Monday at the Excellence in Government Conference in Washington, sponsored by Government Executive.

Leslie Ann Pearson, senior associate at Booz Allen Hamilton, said "onboarding" was not used as a retention tool by agencies and orientation for new employees tends to be a paperwork exercise. "They may not be getting any mission information," she said. "One employee said he was sworn in in a hallway without an American flag. It's not inspiring. We had one employee who showed up for work and their manager didn't know they were coming.

"The report, which included feedback from 11 agencies, said the federal government had no consistent approach to onboarding and orientation, even though high-quality programs can boost employee performance and eliminate turnover.

The report authors recommended a five-step approach to acclimating new employees. Agencies should reach out to and prepare for new employees as soon as they accept job offers. On a recent hire's first day, the report suggested agency managers spend time teaching mission values and introducing the employee to senior leadership and possible mentors who can help them negotiate the new environment. Also, managers should be directly involved during the employee's first week, according to the the report, to set performance expectations and ensure that the hire starts doing meaningful work as soon as possible. During the first 90 days, managers should both give and solicit feedback and provide initial training. During the first year, employees should receive recognition, formal feedback and a development plan.

"The first 90 days are when the employee is thinking, 'Did I make the right decision, should I stay with this organization?'" Pearson said. "It's no surprise that the agencies we went to that had stronger onboarding programs were higher up on the [list of PPS'] Best Places to Work.

"Cynthia Heckmann, chief human capital officer at the Government Accountability Office, said her agency had succeeded by analyzing GAO's workforce challenges and rebuilding its onboarding strategy from the ground up.

"We put together a two-year program for our entry-level staff. It's very structured in terms of the training we provide," Heckmann said. "Every two months there's a review and a pay component.

"GAO also built a mass notification system, Heckmann said, and as soon as a new employee accepted an offer, everyone from information technology to GAO's shared service center was alerted so the employee had what they needed to do their job when they arrived on their first day.

Candace Irwin, director of workforce systems and the accountability division at NASA, said systems integration was particularly important for agencies like NASA that carefully monitor access to facilities and deal with classified information. A single system allows human resources officers to fill in information about new hires, request technology and alert security to the arrival of new employees. NASA also has built a portal that provides information to new hires and their families so they can prepare for their first days at work.

Joyce Cofield, director of recruitment, retention and diversity in the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in the Treasury Department, said OCC woos candidates seriously, sending them gift baskets when they accept jobs, and then intensely inculcates them in OCC's values.

"Orientation is where we seal the deal," she said. "We spend a full week with our college recruits, and we do all those pieces of reinforcing the OCC culture.

"Irwin emphasized that onboarding has to be continuous. "Onboarding is a process; it's not an event, she said, "and it has to begin before the employee shows up at the gate."

First impressions matter. We know that if we can get employees familiar with their jobs and trained up, they'll do better...that's obvious. But if we welcome them aboard and treat them well from the start -- with simple respect and some recognition of their enthusiasm -- they're likely to stick around longer, too.

Managing Free Agents

Even if you don't invest a lot of time and effort in leading your free agents, you still have to manage them. in fact, the more you back away from leadership, the more time you'll probably have to spend on management. If nothing else, you need to find them, then hire or contract with them, then keep track -- somewhat -- of what they're doing.

Finding free agents is easy. Finding good free agents can be a little trickier. If you're hiring them for the first time you won't know much about the quality of their work. Hopefully they will have some kind of portfolio or can provide qualified references you can check out. Finding free agents through sites like Elance or Guru.com allows you to see how they've done before, whether through employer feedback or links to portfolios. Craigslist is certainly an option too, but you won't learn anything more about them than they want you to know.

When it comes to actually hiring people, get some legal advice early on. If you're going to be doing this regularly you should have a standardized contract where you fill in the blanks depending on the project. Of course, by working with a free agent you've got less paperwork to worry about. There's no health insurance to worry about, no Social Security...just tax paperwork once a year, which is a lot less difficult than withholding taxes from every check.

How you pay your free agent is up to you. You can pay by the hour or pay by the project. If you do the former, you're really paying for the process, and you might be paying them for time they aren't actually working if they finish in less time than they quoted you. If you choose to simply pay by the project, what you're paying for is the product rather than the process...you need to figure out which method best addresses what's most important to you.

If you do decide to pay by the hour you'll need to find some way to track their work. That's tough. A lot of free agents will be working off-site. Now, with your regular employees, working off-site is not necessarily a problem because, ideally, you have a relationship with them that engenders trust, and you don't need to see what they're up to. But with free agents, especially when you haven't worked with them before, you don't really know that when they bill you for 30 hours they really worked 30 hours. So, either find a way to keep an eye on their billable hours, or agree on a price for the project and just go with that.

In any creative field, free agents are an important element. To stay fresh you sometimes need to be willing to reach out beyond your pool of talent and bring in something new. But that's easy to say, tougher to do. Leading Creatives who work for you regularly can be challenging, but making the best use of the talents of those occasional workers requires some extra management skills on your part. So before you jump into that make sure to think about what's required.

Telework

You know a concept has really taken off when its undergoes a name change. Now that "telecommuting" has become "telework," that must mean it's mainstream.

The name change makes sense, of course. You're doing your work via the telecom, not going anywhere. But I digress.

There are a number of advantages to having your employees work offsite. For instance:

You can get more work out of them Currently, I spend 90 minutes a day commuting by bus and train. If I could get those 90 minutes back, I'd be willing to give an hour to work and keep 30 minutes for myself.

They're in a better mood They're not dealing with "post commute" fatigue in the morning and their not watching the clocks they don't miss the bus in the evening. Creatives do better when they're not stressed unnecessarily.

They can follow their own work habits, not someone else's Creatives are very individualized. Some prefer to spread 8 hours over 12 hours, some prefer to get it all done in a bursts of energy, and others would rather work late into the night so they can watch Ellen during the day. Telework helps avoid cramming everyone into the same working style.

Employees save money And everybody's good with that. Gas prices aren't going to go down until, oh, never, so keeping people off the roads keeps money in their pockets, and they like that. And if your firm offers transit subsidies to get people to use public transportation, well, now you can save on that.

It's good for the environment An article a couple weeks ago reported that 1.35 billion gallons of gasoline could be saved each year if everyone who could telework did so 1.6 days a week. That's good for Mother Earth, and it resonates with many of the people working for you.

It lowers your real estate costs Office space is pretty expensive, and you can cut back on it dramatically if people are working remotely. If there are times when they have to come in, some firms have gone to hoteling and will have offices and conference rooms available, albeit on a smaller scale.

There are some potential problems with telework. For many traditionalists, these problems provide enough reason not to do it. Of course, that's because they haven't tried to find a way around them:

Out of Sight Some managers are concerned that, if they can't see their employees, they may not be working. The trick here is to focus on your employees' output without worrying what they're doing every minute of the day. And frankly, if you don't trust them, what does that say about your working relationship?

Group Work Some work needs to get done in groups. Very often you'll have teams that need to come together and hash things out. Some of that can be done online, of course...iChat and Google Docs can help bring work together even if the people don't come together. Providing a central office where people can come together or making use of telework sites or libraries as meeting points can get a group together when it's needed then allow it to disperse when solo work is better.

Individual Working Style As we noted above, everyone has their own style, and for some, that style is working in a group. Some do it because it makes it easier to slack off if there are others around to talk to, but for some Creatives they feed off the energy of a group of bright people working hard together. You need to tailor the office style to your employees' requirements...don't implement a really great idea only to see productivity fall off.

Information Sharing and Security In the office you "hopefully) have a network with good security. Bouncing around with telework, though, each individual is largely responsible for their own information security, and not all of us are experts. This can be a real problem, so you should invest in a security consultant to help you out.

Separating Work and Home This is a biggie, and it's one reason you'll get pushback from some employees. I know that when I work in an office I like to turn that off when I get home. I think if I teleworked it would be different, but I'd need a room set aside at home that was for work only, so I could close the door and get away. Still, when I was a grad student I mostly worked at home, and it was hard to turn it off...it seemed like the work was always there. Some people will just keep working and working when the work's always in front of them...a good friend of mine had his computer in his bedroom and would work the strangest hours, and far too many of them. For those who need the separation, either offer an office or find a separate site like a telework facility.

For a lot of creative industries telework has become, if not the norm, at least accepted and often expected. Artists and designers who can sketch anywhere and photographers who always carry a camera are already used to the idea of working any place.

For many bureaucracies, with set working hours or regular interface with customers or other organizations, telework has not been warmly embraced. But even in the US government there are exceptions...the Patent and Trademark Office, which has some very smart people examining the work of true Creatives has one of the most flexible work plans of any government agency, and it works very well for them. If even the government can make something like this work, surely you can consider it yourself.

Net Usage and You

There are all kinds of programs out there that let you monitor your employees' Internet use. I won't list any of their names so I don't give them any free publicity...if you think you need them, there's a Google search bar on the right of the screen. Plenty of firms have policies regarding Internet use on company time, and those policies are getting stricter all the time. The question is...why?

What might your employees be doing that doesn't seem related to their job? Well, checking out blogs (like this one, hopefully) or reading newspapers from Spain might seem unnecessary (unless you live in Spain, of course). they might be keeping in touch with friends through Facebook, IMs, Twitter, or some other way that they can tell each other how horribly busy they are avoiding work. Maybe they're just doing a little shopping...it's no secret the Monday after Thanksgiving in the US is the biggest online shopping day of the year, once people return to the office.

But you need to consider the role of the Net in your business. Don't just think about the traditional uses in your field; consider too how these seemingly personal activities might help you. Your Creatives can find inspiration and information in lots of different areas you might not think of, so blocking entire categories of sites will probably keep them from viewing something they could really use. Designers in particular, whether graphic designers or hair designers, can get a lot of great ideas from just skimming through different sites, so try not to limit them if you don't need to. Anyone working in any sort of knowledge creation or research will need access to a range of stuff that most people might not. In one government job I had a friend was studying methods of terrorist communication and needed to look at the web sites the bad guys were using. problem was, since we were on a government network, those sites were blocked, and even after he got a waiver for some specific sites he would get a phone call about once a week from the security folks asking what he was doing. You need to be careful about giving people a task and then taking away their tools.

Another example: last week the Secretary of Defense lectured a group of Air Force officers about the need to think creatively about counterinsurgency warfare. But the Air Force recently instituted a policy that restricts Air Force computers from accessing any website with "blog" in the URL. So anything on Blogger, for instance is blocked, including such things as all those blogs written by people on the ground in places like Iraq and Afghanistan who might have some pretty good ideas about things like, oh, counterinsurgency warfare. The military already has some strict limits on blogging in a war zone so as to not give away information useful to an enemy, but what security purpose is satisfied by blocking military people from receiving that information? Telling people to think outside the box and then cutting their access to the outside of the box doesn't make a lot of sense.

As you ask yourself "why do I care what they do online?" remember there are some things you should be worried about, things that will definitely hurt your company. Illegal activity, of course, can leave you liable since it's happening over your network. This includes everything from illegal music downloads to pimping goats online (I just put that in because I want to see if anyone Googles "pimping goats" and finds this site). Viruses and other malicious code can screw up more than just the first computer it hits. And of course, you lose out on productivity when bandwidth gets used up, shared drives are filled with downloaded movies, and employees spend all their time doing something other than work.

There are some ways to address these concerns, mostly through putting the responsibility back onto the employee. Have a written agreement with them that limits your claim of responsibility and allows them to accept responsibility for appropriate use of the Internet. Perhaps include a clause where they acknowledge that illegal activity on their part is grounds for firing. If you see legal-but-annoying problems emerge, talk directly with the employee rather than creating company-wide policies. I guess the bottom line is, try trusting your employees and see how that works.

But you need to look at more than just potential problems...you need to consider what the true output is. If you're employees are doing good work, if they are putting in a lot of effort despite doing their Christmas shopping at the office, then what benefit do you get from shutting that off? Is employees' Net usage really eating up your capacity or causing you to miss deadlines? Don't make something into a problem if it's not a problem, and though you should try to nip potential problems in the bud, avoid restricting the entire company because of a few individuals. Save the "Net Nanny" programs for your kids, not your adults.

Dressing for Successing

For decades, American business has demanded that men wear a "uniform" consisting of suits and ties while women wear appropriate (whatever that means) clothing equivalent to a suit, all to present a professional business image.

In the past few years, American schools have started shifting to uniforms to get rid of clothing "competition" and one-upmanship, especially between kids who really can't afford that Dolce skirt. Those schools without uniforms are adopting stricter and tighter dress codes.

So with this history of, and continuing trend toward, uniformity, should you demand suits and ties in your business?

No. Unless you're a funeral home, that is.

People need to feel comfortable at work for you to get the best results from them. If they're looking forward to the time when they can get home and get out of these clothes then their mind will be on something other than producing and they're going to leave as soon as they can. So much for meeting deadlines.

When you've got creative people working for you, you need to get used to the idea that their creativity extends beyond making money for you. Creatives tend to want to express themselves in their clothes, their music, their hairstyle, their various bits of metal stuck into various parts of their bodies. If you try to limit their expression then they're liable to go work for someone else who doesn't do that. As far as creating a professional working environment goes (the biggest argument for imposing dress codes), consider that the "professional environment" you want is one where Creatives exercise their skills. In this case, a suit and tie, or even a polo shirt and khakis, would be inappropriate. When's the last time your hairstylist wore a suit?

So be careful about imposing dress codes on your Creatives, and consider just letting them wear what they're comfortable with. If it's inappropriate, peer pressure will often take care of it, and if not, then you can always discuss it with the individual in a way that doesn't embarrass them in front of others.

Some of your people will work closely with customers - -sales reps, for instance, or hairstylists -- and if they're good at their job they'll figure out pretty quickly what kind of attire will make the best impression on the client. And if they're not good at their job, they shouldn't be working for you in the first place.

My last government position was in a big cubicle farm with few windows. Most of the people there were research analysts of some variety who never saw the light of day or, for that matter, anyone from outside the organization. There they sat, huddled over their desks, in their coats and ties. Many of them came to work in casual clothes then changed once they were there. Who, exactly, were they supposed to be impressing? Each other? One suggestion that was offered was to let people dress casually but keep a suit in the office in case they had to suddenly go to an unexpected meeting, but that never went anywhere.

I used to get my hair cut at Toni&Guy. Their stylists had to wear all white or all black. I didn't like the assembly-line feeling that came with a bunch of people dressed alike. And ask yourself: should hairstylists, who often work with hair coloring, be wearing white? There were many reasons that salon had a high turnover rate, and according to the stylists I talked to before I left, the dress code was among the top three.

Part of what you pay Creatives for is their creative judgement, so let them exercise it. And if you discover that someone has crappy judgement when it comes to clothes, that might tell you something about their judgement when it comes to work, too. Drop a hint (and not necessarily a subtle one) if something seems amiss, and if they can't figure it out, then consider letting them go if the bad clothing choices outweigh their contribution to the company. But stifling everyone with a dress code just because one person's an idiot is a bad idea.

Keep Meetings in Check

Last week I suggested you should use meetings to communicate more effectively. And I meant it. But people, there's a limit.

Meetings are very important for getting information out to your employees and clearing up any confusion so they can focus on their creative work instead of on whether or not the company's about to go under. But don't fall in love with the idea that these folks are sitting at your feet waiting for great wisdom to spout forth from you...they just want to know about the latest benefits package, or something. It's easy to fall into the trap of calling meeting after meeting after meeting, and letting them drag on and on and on, but DON'T DO IT.

Some bosses have meetings because they don't know what else to do, and if they can go home at night and say "wow, my day was just crammed with meetings," then they can feel like they accomplished something even though they probably didn't. And of course, some employees like to sit in meetings because it beats working. How often have you sat around listening to someone talking about what they should be doing instead of actually doing it? Try not to be that person, OK?

Work rarely gets done in a meeting. They are designed to pass information and to discuss issues, not to get things done. There are exceptions, of course, like when you have a team project and you need to come together to make some decisions or finalize a project, but most meetings are designed for information transfer. So go into a meeting with low expectations for getting work done.

I had a government boss who was deputy director of our division. We had meetings every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for an hour at a time. This was so he could be updated on the work we were doing, which of course we hadn't we hadn't done much of...because we were sitting in meetings. Do the math: 3 hours (sometimes more) in meetings is nearly 10% of a 40-hour work week. That's a lot of wasted time.

After a year and a half with this supervisor, working in a very bureaucratic division, he and some of the rest of us broke out and created a strategic planning group with him in charge. Finally, we'd gotten out of the mundane, inbox-to-outbox world and stepped into some long-range thinking. What was his first decision? "We're going to have meetings every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for an hour at a time." Uh uh. I told him "you can have as many meetings as you want, but pick the ONE you really want me to come to and I'll be there." (the advantage of a government job is it's really tough to get fired for talking back to your supervisor) Oh, and these were just the "administrivia" meetings -- we'd also be having "focused sessions" to explore different issues. I told him that when I needed other people to sit around and talk about my project instead of working on their own, I'd let him know (once again, thank goodness for job security).

One other point about this boss and then I'll move on: he used to answer the phone during his meetings. Never never never never never do this. Do not waste your employees' time by calling them for a meeting and then conversing with someone who's not there. Trust me, we were NOT impressed by how important he was. If possible, turn off the ringer on your phone. If you really don't think you can ignore the phone or e-mail for very long, well, there's your incentive to wrap this up quickly. Personally, I like the attitude of a law firm in suburban New York that has banned electronic devices, including Blackberries, during important meetings (which makes me wonder: if the meeting is unimportant, why have it in the first place?). Get in, get it done, get out, and then worry about other stuff.

If it seems I'm opposed to meetings, I'm not. I'm opposed to unnecessary meetings, to meetings that last too long, and to people sitting around talking about work but never actually doing any. If you're working in a factory or in some bureaucratic office, people might enjoy going to meetings because it gets them away from the mundane work they're doing, but if you've got creative people who are excited about their work, the last thing you want to do is derail that enthusiasm with two hours of stories about your latest vacation.

The first collection of Dilbert comic strips was called Always Postpone Meetings With Time Wasting Morons. If you can, let this book be your bible.

Top-Down Communication

A lot of the discussion this week has been about 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 creative employees' 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.

Management by Wandering About

Back in the day there emerged a concept called Management by Walking Around. The idea behind it was pretty sound: you can't lead people from behind a closed door, but instead need to get out there and see what they're doing, listen to what they have to say, and so on. It's a motivational tool and also a way to keep information flowing and communication open. This works better than an "open door policy" because honestly, that's a pretty passive thing for the boss. You're waiting for employees to come to you and one problem with that is, by the time they DO come to you, it's often because a problem has gotten big, a problem that could have been dealt with sooner.

Anyway, Management by Walking Around is a very useful idea. It gained popularity in a time before e-mail, so some might say that now information and communication can flow electronically without the need for personal contact. I think that's wrong. First, your employees need to know you're interested in what they're doing, and getting out from behind your desk demonstrates that. Plus, they might be doing some pretty specialized tasks, and that's simply not going to translate in an e-mail. And of course, if they're having trouble producing, you'll have a better idea why if you've actually been out there interacting with and observing them.

But there's another way this could go...what I call Management by Wandering About. And this one's not so great. For me there's a big difference between this and Walking Around. Walking Around is all about 2-way interaction with your employees so you can create a better workplace and a better product. Wandering About is all about self-gratification, cornering your employees so they have to listen to you. It's about walking into people's cubicles with your coffee and interrupting the flow of their work. Too often, it's about walking in and regaling them with tales of your time in the French Resistance, or this great restaurant you found in Kuala Lumpur. Ultimately, you end up abusing your authority -- because really, people can't just tell the boss to piss off -- by making people listen to you even when they have better things to do.

The worst, of course, is when you wander into people's work and tell them how to do what they're doing when you don't have any real expertise or knowledge of what they've done before now.

If it sounds like I have experience with a boss like this, I do. And you probably do too. My last boss in government was a really good guy whom I respected. He was a good leader and this was the only truly annoying habit he had (well, other than preferring Holiday Inn while the rest of us liked Hilton) so we could certainly forgive him that. Unfortunately, after 40 years of government service around the world he was full of stories which were occasionally interesting but which also ran on and on and on and on (and on and on). And these were one-sided stories -- as soon as you mentioned something of your own that would remind him "of that one time" and he'd be off. Interesting though it might have been, he really gave his employees the idea that he didn't view what they said as very important because he was always cutting people off in favor of his own tales. And of course, he interrupted their work, which in a creative field can be a little tricky since once people start running with a good idea it's often best to let them keep going.

So don't be that guy. Get out there, yes, and talk with your employees, but that's talk WITH, not just talk TO. Communication goes both ways. And if you get the feeling that by strolling around the office you might be annoying your employees rather than motivating or helping them, you're probably right.