ment of looking externally and focu

ment of looking externally and focusing on growing revenue. Revenue
growth efforts can energize people and improve productivity.
Expense control and internal micromanagement are demoralizing.”
Businesses can fall into the trap of meeting excessively to create
more focus on savings, expenses, and cutting. More significantly,
this focus takes eyes away from external opportunities, in
the form of customers and their needs. “If people concentrated
more on doing a good job for the customer and less time trying to
further themselves in corporate America, the work environment
would be completely different,” says a manager at a medium-sized
company. “Most of them don’t realize that the first will result in
the latter if they are truly sincere about doing a good job.”
So, the next time you’re running off to yet another meeting, you
should stop and check whether you should even be going to it. If
you are the one who called the meeting, you might want to check
whether attendees also self-evaluated whether the meeting is right
for them. Try answering the following questions, as well as have
others attending answer them:
Is This Meeting for Me?
• Is this meeting necessary for me to attend?
• What is the potential ultimate benefit of this meeting to our
customers?
• Should this meeting be canceled or eliminated for good?
• Why do we have this meeting?
• Is there frequently positive action from this kind of meeting?
• If you called this meeting, did the attendees honestly answer
these same questions?
Extended Focus
Tough management also can mean looking for results in areas outside
those that might consume most of a person’s work life. That’s