This is not the time to focus on trivia

This is not the time to focus on trivia

Trivia - a collection of insignificant or obscure items, details, or information.  Sound familiar?  Is the trivia in your organization getting in the way of your growth, profits, success, effective communication or overall performance?   It’s really hard to know if you have numerous locations, over 10 employees, a heavy top-down management style, a micromanagement corporate culture or you are just flat out too busy to sit back and view your organization from a unique or different perspective.  But I will go out on a limb here and bet – that somewhere in your organization the Trivia is getting in the way of your growth, sales, profits or overall organization or department performance.

What is corporate trivia?  Well the list is far too long to illustrate here but I will share a few examples to justify my previous statement.

If you were to take any department in your organization such as – operations, finance, sales, administration, distribution, R & D, customer service or any other piece of your business it would be hard to believe that in each business area there are not some: politics, personal agendas, egos, sacred cows or areas of conflict that are getting in the way of that departments or the other areas of the business that they routinely interact with each others effectiveness and performance.

I define trivia from a corporate perspective as the unimportant “stuff” that gets more attention than it deserves or tends to get in the way of major decisions, actions or initiatives by individuals or groups of individuals.

Let me give you just two of the things that I have witnessed in the past several months.  And these are real examples not ones I have conjured up just for this article.

-At a weekly management staff meeting that I attended for a client the group spent over an hour discussing how to improve top-down communication.  The problem was that there were only 3 people in the room (out of 15 managers) who contributed to the discussion.  The President, CEO and CFO did all of the talking.  Trivia?  Well, if you have a communication problem in your organization that’s not trivia but if you get hung up on the details rather than the root corporate cause you’ll never solve the problem.  It became clear to me after only a few minutes that this was a total waste of time if senior management was unable to engage the entire group.

-During a recent regular weekly sales conference call with the entire sales staff who are spread around the country the VP of sales wanted feedback on why a certain customer in one of the 20 sales territories was unhappy.  The conversation on this topic took up half of the total call time.  And yet there were over 45 salespeople on the call.  Now I ask you, do you think the other 44 people got much out of that call?  Why didn’t the VP just have an individual conversation with the representative involved?  Later he explained to me that this problem could become a problem for other salespeople in the future. My response – were there some vital timely issues that did not get discussed during this call because of the extra time spent on this topic?  I’ll let you guess what his answer was.

Trivia takes many forms but I have learned that almost all of it is grounded in the – corporate culture, feedback mechanisms, communication patterns or the predominant management style of the organization.