In an earlier post entitled "Empower Horizontally of Die," I described how we at Tenrox have pushed accountability downwards in our org chart, giving our business process and project managers the accountability and the authority to affect key metrics that are truly important to the organization. By empowering horizontally, we not only get more accomplished as a team, but we also keep our staff involved and energized.

Tracking the right metrics, and making those metrics visible on dashboards,  are critical tactics to our ability to empower horizontally. Without real time visibilty into what’s really going on no one can make good decisions. Like many companies, we used to spend a lot of time in status meetings. But when you add up the number of person-hours that status meetings require, and divide by what actually gets accomplished in those meetings, it is easy to see that they are not a great value to the organization.

In our case, I was based in California for 4 years along with our marketing and professional services teams, some of our R&D teams are in Montreal, and other teams and offices are scattered across the globe. Physical status meetings became as impractical as they were ineffective. When we did have meetings, people got defensive about having to explain their results in front of the group. Frankly, the meetings were boring, even for me.

Under our new approach, each manager has a simple dashboard that we have agreed upon. For example, as Mike McRae, our VP of Professional Services, explained recently, our project managers in professional services use dashboards that include both utilization rates and customer satisfaction metrics. In addition, managers also provide brief descriptions of what they have accomplished for the week and month.

The beauty of the system is that we can all look at these dashboards quickly and understand what needs to be done. A review or call between the accountable manager and his or her boss is rarely necessary. If metrics do not look positive, people generally know already what they need to do to improve their results–they don’t need a weekly one-hour meeting for me to tell them. When a meeting is needed, we meet in small groups to discuss very specific topics. This works out just fine for everyone!

Freedom from status meetings (part of the "MESS" of Meetings, Emails, and SpreadSheets) has saved Tenrox much valuable time, has empowered our workforce, and has liberated our managers, including myself, to do more productive work.