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Weekly Management Meetings | Blind Spots Part Three

5 Common Blind Spots Leaders Have Are Not Seeing How To:

Company Planning Collaborative Accountability

The aim of this blog series is to remove these common business leader blind spots by focusing your attention on each issue and bringing visibility and understanding to concepts that will be easier to see and, therefore, improve over time. Let’s take a look at the benefits of Collaborative Accountability.

Blind Spot #3 – Not Seeing the Value In Weekly Management Meetings

This article focuses on the third of five blind spots many business owners have when trying to grow from 5 to 50 employees. In a previous article, we discussed the first blind spot which was around not seeing the value of consistent company planning and the second blind spot focusing on how to maintain employee accountability.

The third blind spot lies in not realising the value and importance of a weekly management meeting. Many jokes are made about meetings because good meetings are hard to come by, but when done well, an efficient, well-executed weekly management meeting is an absolute game-changer.   

Do you struggle to see the value in weekly management meetings? If so, it is typically because you don’t feel you and your team have time to meet, when staying ‘productive’ seems to be a more practical use of your time. Another common issue is the feeling that meetings aren’t very productive. Last but not least, a leader can feel it is difficult, possibly even painful, trying to facilitate a meeting week over week when it seems to be a repetition of the previous week’s topics.

Truth be told, all those things can be legitimate challenges of past meetings, but it doesn’t have to be that way, and when weekly meetings are run well they will raise both the economic and productivity aspects of your business.  

What’s required to create effective weekly management meetings?  

Defining the format of your weekly management meeting is essential. Whether it is the staff included or the structure and schedule of the meeting itself, clearly planning each aspect is vital, and surprisingly simple. The following four steps will ensure that you not only hold an efficient meeting, you will also find exceptional value in it and recognise it as a fundamental and productive part of every single week.

Weekly Management Meetings

Step 1: Decide on who should be in the weekly management meetings

If you have less than 10 employees it is likely everyone should be in the meeting. When the company grows, it can be reduced to the managers of the various departments. This is the team that needs to understand and fortify where you want the company to go.  Without this clarity, it is nearly impossible for them to make the best day-to-day decisions on how to achieve the results you want from them. Many accountability issues stem from a lack of understanding rather than a low level of commitment.

Step 2 – Prepare for your weekly management meetings

You should have two key company documents and strategies in place: 

1. Your quarterly and yearly goals. You will need to know where you want the company to go before you can begin having effective weekly meetings.  These plans should include two key elements:

2.  The core financial numbers that often include revenue, gross profit and sometimes a more net profit type of number like EBIT (Earnings Before Interest and Tax).  Ideally, some KPIs (key performance indicators) can also be included but we don’t need to get too fancy out of the gate.  

3.  The critical projects the company needs to complete by the end of the quarter (or any 90-day cycle) to be able to hit the desired financial and strategic targets. Often in management books, these ‘projects’ are referred to as “Rocks” and we do the same in our management consulting practice. Rock identification and completion is a topic unto itself but for the purpose of this article, we will keep the concept to the identification of how the company can most practically improve over the next 90 days to best move it towards its desired outcomes (vision, mission, BHAG, 1-3 year goals, etc.).  

Step 3 – Have a practical company scorecard

Ultimately, you want to have a scorecard that monitors all relevant aspects of company performance but that often takes some time and effort to get right. Start with some basic numbers that offer an overarching projection of your company’s health. For example, your company revenue may seem like a valid number to track on your scorecard, but it is a ‘lagging indicator’. It doesn’t shed much light on how the company is performing this week because it requires invoice and/or money collection and demonstrates how the sales team was performing last month and your marketing the month before that. When you try to pick a few initial scorecard numbers to track it is often more effective to use more ‘leading indicators’ such as the number of proposals submitted or the number of new qualified opportunities for a projected period.  

Regardless of which numbers you pick, begin measuring and documenting something consistently. There is a very good reason great business people consistently say, “what gets measured gets managed.” When you don’t measure with practical numbers you have no objective measuring stick for providing performance feedback.  

Step 4 – Use a proven meeting formula

There is no reason to reinvent the wheel. Great weekly management meetings have the same attributes:

    1. They happen the same time every week.
    2. They start on time and end on time.
    3. They stay on topic and are not allowed to devolve into unfocused dialogue.
    4. They have a consistent agenda that includes:
      1. Starting on a note of gratitude or positivity.
      2. Review the week’s performance scorecard – regardless of how simple initially
      3. Share employee / team and customer headlines for the week
      4. Review the status of this quarter’s “Rocks” or projects.
      5. Review the To Do’s that were identified in the previous meeting(s) to ensure completion and accountability.
      6. Discuss the key issues, opportunities and topics that have come up over the previous week
      7. Rate the meeting on a scale of 1-5 on whether it provided value for the individuals attending and rating the meeting.
    5. At the end of each 90-day period, a day-long planning meeting is utilised to update the Goals and Rocks and have a longer session to unpack bigger opportunities and challenges facing the company.

In conclusion, weekly management meetings are often not seen as critical to a company’s success but this is due to a blind spot created by a history of negative meeting experiences. 

By following the four steps outlined above, any existing blindspot will quickly and permanently be removed creating a new opportunity for greater employee accountability and buy-in along with significantly higher company performance.  

Until next time, enjoy the process!

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Case Studies

Case Study: HRM

From Burnt Out Business Owner to Red Hot Leader in 3 Months

The Process:

Better Execute initially listened and helped Sally identify her core issues and concerns. It became clear that she still loved the industry she worked in and was a big believer in the value of the services she was providing. Her challenge was that she felt exhausted trying to fill in the gaps her employees were creating by not being accountable for their deliverables. 

Better Execute worked with Sally to optimise the structure of the business then helped her clearly define the roles and responsibilities for each of the positions or ‘seats’ in the company. Finally, Better Execute worked directly with Sally’s team to articulate the newly clarified direction of the company, their individual responsibilities and KPIs. 

The Results:

After three months of troubleshooting, restructuring and engaging with the overall team, Sally is feeling re-energised and looks forward to growing HRM to an entirely new level. Everyone needs to see a compelling future in order to feel inspired.

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Case Studies

Case Study: Bendpro

From Reactive to Proactive Company Management in Under 3 Months

The Process:

Bendpro has an effective board that helped the company gain clarity on their one- and three-year goals.  Better Execute identified a need to better unpackage the one-year goals into a set of quarterly projects (or rocks). These would help the management team focus on the best initiatives to work on each quarter to achieve the year-end goal.  Additionally, Better Execute helped the management team define their roles and responsibilities so that Allen could become more free to focus on strategic activities such as customer interactions. Finally, Better Execute facilitated week-over-week management meetings to help monitor the team’s performance.

Business Goals

The Results:

Allen feels he has moved from reacting to the company’s needs in the moment to a more proactive manager with greater clarity and focus. The management team stepped up with their higher level of clarity on what they are most accountable for and how they can better support Allen with day-to-day operations.

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Case Studies

Case Study: Festival Services

Freeing Up a Visionary in Less Than Three Months

The Process:

Better Execute was engaged to help Boris break free of the day-to-day grind and do what he does best, which is to identify the next big thing for customer experiences, as well as entirely new events. Better Execute provided the strategy and leadership to define a better company structure and delegate activities according to the skills of the highly talented team members. Quarterly meetings were setup to clearly define the key deliverables for the quarter, and weekly performance meetings were facilitated by Better Execute to ensure that the desired outcomes were obtained.

Festival Services

The Results:

In less than three months Boris was able to delegate and elevate his position in the company to that of a true strategic leader. He feels he has more control over his business and more time available for his family as needs arise.

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Case Studies

Case Study: Keith Atkinson Electrical

From Boom to Bust to Boom

The Process:

Better Execute, in conjunction with a virtual CFO, reviewed Seth’s business and financial books and quickly confirmed that Seth was correct in being concerned. There were several errors found in the books and a general lack of clarity on the Gross Profit numbers on specific jobs and services. Although revenue was looking okay, gross profit and revenue recognition timing were serious issues. It became clear Seth was going to run out of cash and become insolvent.

Business Coaching

The Results:

Better Execute identified strategic money and terms that were agreeable and seen as synergistic to all parties. It is still early days post investment, but all signs show that Terawatt will bounce back stronger with better management as a result of the near catastrophic event.

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Case Studies

Case Study: Moddex

From $29 to $41 million in revenue in 12 Months

The Process:

At Better Execute, the first step of the process is to understand your business and your specific needs. In Moddex’s case it was initially creating clarity around the short and mid-term goals.

This heightened focus and detail allowed us to identify the weak links in the company’s current staff, processes and technology and the actions required to accomplish the fairly audacious goals. The top issues were identified and, over six months, efforts were made both by Moddex and Better Execute to remedy the problems.

Company Case Study

The Results:

Alvin and the entire Moddex team have done amazing work in overcoming the challenges Better Execute put in front of them. Annual revenue has increased by 71 percent with no signs of slowing its growth rate. At least as importantly, Alvin now feels more mentally clear with greater control over the direction of the company than ever before.