The heart of your business is your leadership team. Effective use of their time during the management meeting is a great opportunity to ensure the team is excited, focussed and contributing to your overall success.
In reality, this opportunity is often not well used. Perhaps because it is a routine, we tend to go through the motions.
Most meetings start with routine updates on operational performance. Often captured as Key Performance Indices (KPI’s), and identified as Red (requiring immediate discussion and action), Yellow (worth discussion but less urgent) and Green.
Following this, there are many directions to take this meeting. Consider adding some new ideas. A few suggestions:
- There is a need to keep these meetings reasonably short – (back to the value of your management’s time) which seems to be at odds with engaging in detailed discussions across the different functions of the business. Consider adding one more detailed dashboard/week for each function, rotating the role over the month. One approach I am currently engaged with is as follows:
a) Week 1: Operations
b) Week 2: Sales & Marketing
c) Week 3: Finance
d) Week 4: R&DThese dashboards do not replace the weekly updates but dig a little deeper into relevant insights and can invite longer discussions. It is important you challenge the functional head to go deeper. Don’t just present the facts but dig into what improvements could be explored.
- Keep an Action Log on a shared server that can be added to by the individual managers as the actions progress. You may already be doing this, but if not, you should. Each item requires an owner. It is also important to not fall into the trap of capturing too many items. Those that should really be addressed separately by each functional group do not require the entire team’s engagement.
- Perhaps start the meeting with a call for any good news. Wins, achievements, anything that is worth a celebration. Customer success stories are particularly worthy of celebrating. Given that bookings/revenues are essential to growth and profitability, any insights into new business is worth additional focus. That said, operational improvements are also great to identify.
- Finish the meeting with HR: new hires, attrition (exit insights?), team building activities etc. Any discussions around the health of the team, the culture, are worth time on a weekly basis.
- Consider an independent– 3rd party participant. Now this is clearly a self-serving suggestion, but it comes from a ‘hard to argue’ point of view. The intent of an independent participant is obvious- pushback on some of the ideas, introduce new thoughts to the discussion. Back to the point above on ‘asking’, the independent advisor brings years of relevant experience and can add considerably to new ideas and thinking. *
Bottom line – try to shake up the management meetings, moving it beyond the routine, challenging the team to get the most out of them. Sometimes the quieter members need to be asked for their thoughts directly…and often have good ideas.
If you have any thoughts from your own experiences, please let me know – pascoefm4@gmail.com. I would be happy to personalize this discussion.
*That may sound a bit extravagant, but I refer you to a book co-written by Eric Schmidt, ex CEO of Google, called the Trillion Dollar Coach. In that book he points to the value he got (and others such as Steve Jobs of Apple) from the addition of such an individual to his meetings. Of course, the person added must bring both value (experience) and a personality that works with the team. As Eric pointed out ‘a sense of humour’ is always a welcome addition.