Whose Job Is This?
There are lots of details about ThatCon I’d enjoy getting deeply involved with, but it turns out that, as con chair, most of those details are not my job. It’s more important to make sure that someone’s on top of them and get myself out of the way of the process, thereby leaving myself free for the few things that no one else can do.
This turns out to be easier to say than to put into practice. For all kinds of reasons, I’ll resist delegating a task.
I’m guessing that overall the two biggest obstacles to delegating are “no volunteer for a job” and “lack of trust in someone who’s volunteered but with whom I don’t have a track record of success”. Close behind this is “I don’t understand the thing that needs delegating well enough to make a job description.” But yesterday’s delegation difficulties were more subtle. I found myself being the go-to person in a bunch of small decisions when really any of a number of solutions would have sufficed. Why me, I wondered, how did I get here?
- It was something I was interested in and actually have strong opinions about though not necessarily expertly informed ones. So, when asked, it was gratifying to put in my two cents and see the ideas put into practice.
- Relatedly, it was something where I could see the ideas in practice. There was a direct result between decision and result, whereas many of the things I am doing for the con are more about influencing the shape of events and setting up processes where people can work.
- At first I wasn’t sure that there really was someone in place to delegate this topic to in the future. After thinking about it for a while, I realized that there was a person, P, nominally in charge of this area but not engaged in the conversation. That’s interesting!
That last point led to a whole other set of questions.
- How did P get left out of the discussion? Well, theyd originally been included but never responded, and eventually wound up dropped from the cc list.
- Is P interested in this conversation? Does P think that the outcome of this decision is part of his job? I realized that I was assuming that the answers to both of these were “no” but that I didn’t know that for sure.
It’s hard to ask those kinds of questions in email. So I picked up the phone and, luckily, reached P right away so that I could ask for what I wanted, support in getting myself out of the loop of future decision making on this topic. Confirmation that we agreed about the scope of the job responsibilities, and that we agreed P should follow up in the future.
And so after the phone call, I answered the pending question, having my own little bit of fun in molding the universe to the Whim of the Con Chair, but made it clear I’d defer to P for future decisions in the same area.
Totally Like Whatever, You Know?
Just a pointer to Taylor Mali’s poetry today:
A good reminder to me not to be too tentative when I speak.
It’s a beautiful Saturday and I’m going to get out there and enjoy it.
Meeting Planning
Still working on that project of meetings that don’t waste people’s time. I’d like to do better than that — meetings that are fun, meetings that get things done, meetings that inspire or build teamwork for the future — but there are still a lot of stuck patterns that get in the way of making even the low bar.
For one thing, we’re still struggling to get remote people able to participate in a meeting. At our last meeting, we planned ahead to run Skype, but had last minute problems both human and technical. And Skype is not an ideal solution when a handful of people are remote and the vast majority are in the room. It’s just not what it’s for. We’re going to try Skype again but I’m also interested in investigating other conferencing solutions.
For another thing, keeping enough control over the agenda but not so much that I don’t get to find out anything new by having the meeting, is an interesting balancing act. One thing I’m learning is that going around the room giving reports by division is almost always a fail. Boring. Disjointed. No narrative. It worked once, when the question around the room was “what do you have to do to get ready for X deadline” . But open ended reports? Not making me happy.
Next meeting, I’m planning to experiment with getting the division reports boiled down to about a sentence or two each and onto a handout in advance.
It is completely impossible to over-prepare for running a meeting. At least I haven’t managed to do it yet. The meeting I’m currently trying to over-prepare for is a full-day retreat of about 25 people — almost all my division heads and some of the assistant division heads. I think they trust me not to waste their time at this point. But I’d like this to be really something special, and fun.
Good challenges and … the harder kind
Sarah Twichell (of the blog Edge to Center) asked me today What makes the difference between a challenge you rise to and a challenge you’re overwhelmed by? Good question, and I had to think about it for a bit. Here are a few things I thought of:
On the overwhelm side:
- tasks that I think are going to get a lot of negative judgement from others
- tasks that I can’t break down into pieces that I know how to do
- tasks where you can’t get feedback on whether it’s going OK until the end
- times when I’m not managing adequate self-care,
- excessive multi-tasking.
On the successful side:
- when someone is depending on me
- when lines of authority are clear
- when the purpose of the task is clear
- when I have enough time to make a plan
- when I can reach out for support
Challenges don’t fall neatly into one category or another. I can easily be daunted by one aspect of a major project even as I make progress on related areas. Sometimes I just have to plunge ahead, overwhelmed or not.
Thinking about this helps me be more sympathetic to other people’s overwhelm — and helps me think of some ways to improve how I’m delegating so I’m not adding to the problem.
Some Thoughts About Email
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: communication, email etiquette
Comments (14) Sometimes the best response to email is to just not say anything. In addition to the Right Speech guidelines of “Is it kind? Is it necessary? Is it true?” you might also have to ask “Is it Actually My Job?” “Is it timely?” “Is it useful?” “Is it congruent?”
If you’re aggravated. If the words in your head sound snarky or short tempered even to yourself. Probably this isn’t going to go well. Managing tone in email requires first of all managing your own inner conversation.
If you haven’t given other people enough time to solve the problem themselves. Or if the email has been sitting there for too long in a fast moving situation, and you need, first, to check if you’re responding to a current reality.
If you’re just cc’d on an email. You’re probably just being copied for information. Maybe answering this email really isn’t your job. (Even if you have the information — see above about letting people solve their problems.)
If your answer involves information you don’t have time to actually look up but you’ll gesture vaguely in the direction that it exists. If you’re not sure what response you want next from your email, keep thinking and refine the question or the answer.
If you’re saying something on behalf of someone else, or to protect someone else. In general, shut up and let them speak for themselves.
I sometimes send 10, 20, even 50 emails in a day. Do I get this right on all of them? I’m sure I don’t. But each time I consider these questions first, it goes better in the end.
If you ask people whom you consider to be wise and courageous about their lives, you may find that they have hurt a lot of people and made a lot of mistakes, but that they used those occasions as opportunities to humble themselves and open their hearts. We don’t get wise by staying in a room with all the doors and windows closed. — Pema Chodron
Metaphor of the Day take 2
Well there has been a crazy long gap between posts here, but there are still about 120 days to go until the convention, and there will probably be some ruminating afterwards. Rather than regretting the lost summer (and spring) of blogging, I will just start where I am.
I said to someone last week, “after Labor Day, it’s a long fast downhill slide to January”, and a Former Conchair agreed. “Yes, that’s just how it is.”
So, now firmly in the slide, committed to the downhill and picking up speed rapidly.
Metaphor of the Day
Being conchair of ThatCon is like being head magician of an amazing machine. Of which I do not know all the incantations to use all its miraculous capabilities and besides it has a mind of its own. And talks back.
Learning from Last Year
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: facilitation, having fun is important, meetings, rituals
Comments (2,975) Every year the staff of ThatCon ends the year with a pile of notes about what to change for next year. And then the notes go in a file and we completely forget them.
Wait, not really. The formal meeting that we call “the debrief” is not that effective a way of fixing the institutional anything. Three or four hours of sitting in a room hearing reports one division at a time and getting little bullets of feedback in three minute increments with no discussion time is, in and of itself, not a good way to fix anything. I suspect that far more real change gets accomplished in the informal small-group dinners that inevitably follow.
We keep doing it because it serves a purpose. A couple of purposes. First of all, by having a meeting, we have a due date when the written copies of all of those reports are due. We have about a dozen standard questions about what went well, what went badly, and what needs to be changed for the future. Sum total of those reports, posted to our staff web site, are a great resource for those that follow.
Second of all, many volunteer organizations have trouble with giving thanks and recognition, and we’re no exception. It’s insufficient, but necessary, for those people who led the organization to get a chance to stand up and say, this is what I did.
Third, it’s kind of a closing ritual.
Still. Three or four hour of sitting in room hearing three minute reports, Madame Conchair, how does that jibe with your New Year’s Resolution a month ago about no boring meetings? It’s hard to do much with this format.
You can:
- make it run on time
- take good notes so that people who can’t be there or can’t stay for the whole thing have access
- make the meeting available to remote participants and let people with laptops write down their comments in real time
- have a little bit of humor and a little bit of audio-visual
- have name tags so we stop pretending that we all know everyone, and making the new folks feel even more out of the loop. I could write a whole little post about that alone.
We did all those things, and the best I can say for it is it wasn’t a horrible meeting.
The best thing we did was make a reservation down the block for a bunch of pool tables for afterwards. The fun and conversation there made up, a little bit, for our yearly exercise in trying to cram a summary of thousands of hours of work into an afternoon.
But wait! I have an idea. For an Experiment. Of how to do this better, more productively, and a lot more fun next year. I’ll save that for another post though.
Worst. Idea. Ever.
Three sentence email is the idea that all emails should be no more than three sentences long.
Email takes too long to respond to, so pledge that all emails will be answered in three sentence or less. Well if you take that pledge, I hope you are not using these emails to form or reinforce a relationship, convey a complex concept, or convince someone of a new idea.
Actually, if you are taking that pledge, I hope you’re not emailing me.
Staffing up
I skipped writing about the debrief from the last convention, and there’s a lot to say about that. Right now I’m deep into the process of staffing next year’s con — talking to lots of people on staff, asking them to take various jobs on my convention, and juggling the org chart like a bowl of fruit at a clown convention.
I’ve liked the process to building a tower out of blocks. Living blocks with their own agenda who regularly decide they don’t want to be where they are any more and wander around switching places.
We’re having trouble finding staff in many areas of the con, and somewhat paradoxically, my response to this is to break a lot of jobs into smaller pieces. Smaller, more manageable pieces seem to increase the pool of people willing to tackle them and even more, increases the pool of people I’m willing to trust with them.
The downside is that I’m growing the number of conchair direct reports to a number that I definitely can’t handle on my own. I’m planning to ask my as-yet-unappointed assistant conchairs to take groups of divisions and provide oversight to them. This is adding a whole additional level of challenge as I figure out what groups logically belong together, what groups only belong together because of the personal talents of the staff members, and what people just can’t work together, sending me back to the drawing table again.