Just Say ‘No’ to Meetings (Or Lots of Them, Anyway)

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.

Processes break down and people start to make it up as they go. Performance suffers, discouraged employees leave, customers buy elsewhere and sales decline.

When this happens, who gets blamed? Who loses their job? Typically managers do, because their people didn’t perform and weren’t held accountable.

A manager’s job is to train, educate and develop staffers and to help them succeed. Managers should be buried in that, not in paperwork or meetings. It’s only when managers know what their people are doing – or not doing – that they can help them produce.

To do this, managers must make it a priority to observe, coach and develop. This can happen only when managers streamline their days and refocus their attention on to what matters most.

Instead of agreeing to meet on every issue that comes up, prioritize and resolve as many issues as possible in a daily 30-minute team meeting. This frees everyone’s time so they can all focus on doing their jobs to have a more successful day.

Just say “no” to meetings, or at least marginal ones. When dealership managers do that, they will be surprised at how much time they really have to focus on what counts: selling cars and making money.

Richard F. Libin is the author of the book, “Who Stopped the Sale?” and president Automotive Profit Builders that maximizes customer satisfaction and profits through personnel development and technology. He can be reached at [email protected] or 508-626-9200 or www.apb.cc.