Chapter 8: Mastering the Daily and Weekly Executive Meeting
The faster you grow, the more meetings you should hold. At the heart of executive team performance is a rhythm of tightly run daily, weekly, quarterly and annual huddles and meetings-all of which happens as scheduled, without fail, with specific agendas. Meet with your key people daily.
Meetings: A routine to set you free
This may sound ludicrous to those who have worked for large companies, where meetings are dreaded interruptions that eat up hours or even days. To avoid that hold short, punchy meetings with a structure, time limits, and a specific agenda.
More Meetings, Not Less
In addition to you quarterly and annual meetings there should be also daily, weekly and monthly meetings. The benefit is that you can discuss new opportunities, strategic concerns and bottlenecks as they arise.
Daily Meeting – An Imperative
Absolutely everybody in a growing company should be in some kind of five- to 15-minute huddle daily. 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.
1) Timing
Make on-time attendance mandatory, with no excuses. If the meetings start to go longer than 15 minutes, people will drop the habit.
2) Setting
It’s better to stand up for such meetings than to sit down. Keep it short so that standing up does not become a problem.
3) Who Attends
Decide how many and who should attend the meetings. The general rule is, the more the merrier.
4) Who Runs the Meeting
Pick someone who is naturally structured and disciplined (and that might not be the CEO). Whoever it is, the main job is to keep things running on time. Whenever two or more people get off on a tangent that doesn’t require everybody’s attention, instruct them to continue the conversation outside the boundaries of the meeting.
The Agenda
The Daily Meeting Agenda:
The agenda should be the same structure every day, and it’s just three items long: what’s up, daily measures, and where are you stuck? In the first five minutes, each attendee spends a few seconds (up to 30) just telling what’s up. That alone is valuable, because it lets people immediately sense conflicts, crossed agendas, and missed opportunities. Next, the entire group takes a quick look at whatever daily measurement your company uses to track progress. (You do have one, don’t you?)
The third and most important agenda item is where people are stuck. You are looking for bottlenecks, which ought to be your nemesis in business.
The Weekly Meeting Agenda:
The weekly meeting has a different purpose, and therefore, a different agenda. It’s intended to be a more issues-oriented and strategic gathering.
1) The Schedule
Schedule the meeting for the same time, same place each week. It can be a conference call if the executive or frontline employees work in different locations.
2) Five Minutes: Good News
Each weekly meeting starts with five minutes of good-news stories from everyone. They could be personal or professional in nature, the more fun the better. If someone has gone a couple of weeks without specific good news, the leader should intervene privately to see if everything is okay.
3) Ten Minutes: The Numbers
Spend ten minutes on individual and company-wide measures of productivity. These measures should be displayed graphically.
4) 30 Minutes: A Rock, or Single Issue
The big mistake at weekly meetings is covering everything every week. As a result, the team deals only with the issues on a shallow level and never focuses its collective intelligence for a period of time on one issue. The key is focusing on a large priority for the month or quarter. Limit it to one issue.
Closing Comments
End your weekly meeting by asking each attendee to sum up with a word or phrase of reaction.
It’s ideal if the weekly meeting is just before breakfast, lunch or happy hour so the executives can have a more informal setting in which to discuss issues that surface. That informal time is often when real decisions are fleshed out.
The Monthly Meeting – Agenda is Learning
If the focus of the quarterly and annual meeting is setting strategy and the focus of the daily and weekly meetings is execution, the focus of the monthly meetings is learning. This is a two-hour to four-hour meeting for the extended management team to gather, to review the progress everyone is making on their priorities, to review the monthly Profit & Loss in detail, and to make appropriate adjustments. It’s also a time to do a hour or two of specific training.
Schreibe einen Kommentar