Structure meetings to enhance executive team performance!
The faster you want to grow, the faster you have to pulse.
With these meetings you'll have opportunities to focus your executives on what's important. You'll also solve problems more quickly and easily.
"Meetings" - in this chapter: Short, punchy, with a structure, time limits. and a specific agenda.
The meeting rhythm.
- Annual meetings: you consider that progress and set new goals for the following year
- Quarterly meetings: measure progress toward a year-end goal
The key agenda for them is based around the One-Page Strategic Plan.
You need to add daily, weekly, and monthly meetings because the agendas of those more-frequent meetings drive the deliverables outlined in the less-frequent meetings. Each one builds upon the next.
If you're growing 15% per year, you can treat the year like a year from a strategic thinking stand point.
- 15% /year - one year is a year
- 20-100% /year - one quarter is a year
- 100+% /year - one month is a year
Everyone should be in some kind of 5-15 mins huddle daily.
- "We're too busy" 5-15 mins is the equivalent of a bathroom break! No more "telephone game"
- In one-on-one meetings there's a lot of private negotiating going on, putting the leader in the constant position of being the bad guy. However, by having everyone on the same call for a few minutes, it takes the heat off the leader and provides peer pressure that increases the rate of deliverables.
- A daily meeting focuses the collective intelligence of the team on the issues at hand.
The daily meeting must be set up right. The time can be a little irregularly - e.g., every day at 8:08am
People do a better job of being on time when the time's not on the half or quarter-hour.
Make on-time attendance mandatory, with no excuses!
The meeting is:
- simply for problem identification
- start and end on time
- don't problem solve
avoid sitting comfortably. stand up meeting is ideal.
The more the merrier.
Alan Ruby's approach: get everyone. it gets absolutely everybody out of his or her cubicle and involved. Where once a project leader had to seek out somebody whose task overlapped his or her own, the inevitable redundancies and cross-functional needs now get worked out almost methodically
Pick someone who is naturally structured and disciplined. Whoever it is, the main job is to keep things running on time. Use a countdown stopwatch to make sure you don't let any part of the agenda run away with the meeting. The person has to say "Take it offline." Whenever people get off on a tangent that doesn't require everybody's attention.
Just three items long:
- What's up
- first five minutes
- everybody's telling what's up
- Daily measures
- a quick look at whatever daily measurement your company uses to track its progress.
- Where are you stuck?
- looking for bottlenecks, which ought to be your nemesis in business
- sticking point is a waste!
- everyone hears your fear, your struggle, your concern - it's the first step to solving the problem
- the bottleneck discussion often reveals who's not doing his or her job. Any time somebody goes two days without reporting a sticking point, you can bet there's a bigger problem lurking. Busy, productive people who are doing anything of consequence get stuck pretty regularly. So scrutinize the exec who reports, "Everything is fine!"
- the bottleneck conversation shouldn't be allowed to drift into problem solving. It's ok if somebody wants to reply to a bottleneck by saying, "Call so-and-so"
The daily meeting needs to be kept short
It's intended to be a more issues-oriented and strategic gathering.
By holding daily meetings, you put out a lot of the fires and clear up a lot of the outstanding issues that would otherwise bog down weekly meeting.
It should be the same time, same place each week. 30 mins for frontline employees and a full hour for execs.
good-news stories from everyone. they could be personal or professional in nature
If someone has gone a couple weeks without specific good news, the leader should intervene privately to see if everything is okay
Individual and company-wide measures of productivity. Every firm should have three KPI (smart numbers). These are usually ratios that provide true insight into the future performance of the business. And these measures should be displayed graphically.
Reviewing specific feedback from customers and employees. What issues are cropping up day after day? What are people hearing?
The big mistake made at weekly meetings is covering everything every week. As a result, the team deals only with issues on a shallow level and never focuses its collective intelligence for a period of time on one issue.
Frontline employees spend about ten minutes on Rocks, while the executive team may devote as much as a half hour to it.
Do limit it to just one issue in a weekly meeting.
End your weekly meeting by asking each attendee to sum up with a word or phrase of reaction - it ensures that everyone's had a chance to say something
The focus of the monthly meetings is on learning - a chance for the executive team to "pass its DNA" down to the next level. This is a 2-4 hour meeting for the extended management team together to review the progress everyone is making on their priorities, to review the monthly P&L(profit and loss) in detail, to discuss what's working and not working from a process standpoint. It's also a time to do an hour or two of specific training.
Daily and weekly meetings are demonstrably superior to one-on-one sessions. Where goals are at stake, and accountability is an issue, the peer pressure of the daily and weekly meetings keeps things moving much better than if an individual ecec is reporting to the CEO.
Getting your entire team's brains focused on an issue is much more effective than focusing one-on-one.
As fast as you're pulsing, what makes you so sure you're not headed somewhere you don't want to go? Certainly comes with routine, with rhythm, and yes, with daily and weekly meetings