Managers: quit meeting & manage
Many managers either spend most of their time focusing on meetings and paperwork or are so overwhelmed with business issues they let processes fall by the wayside. I hear managers constantly complain they never have enough time. They spend every minute of their day grappling with issues and running from meeting to meeting and extinguishing fire after fire.
They are not focusing on their actual jobs. While some of these meetings are important, most of them deal with trivial issues that often don’t require a meeting.
In all businesses, managers are under incredible pressure to perform, but the fact is, many of them are neglecting what’s important: their people and customers.
In most management job descriptions, the word “meeting” doesn’t even appear. What is mentioned are responsibilities such as driving business, selling, serving customers and developing workers so they can provide exceptional customer service.
Businesses where managers are too busy to do their jobs typically have difficulty training and developing their people and keeping a structure in place. When this happens, customers may be “helped” by people who lack proper training and supervision.
In that situation, salespeople pick which customers they want to work with, leaving some prospects unattended to aimlessly wander around. Until they leave.
This stretches managers even further, as they run from one problem to another. Their people start to feel left out, communication breaks down and everyone at the business starts to work off of assumptions.
