Every Sunday at 9 am, 9 managers hold a weekly management meeting where each of them presents the same slides of last week’s numbers for sales, operations, finance, HR and marketing. By 11 am the meeting has gone on too long and although one major issue arose – a key customer is threatening to leave – by the time it got discussed late in the meeting, no one managed to take ownership of solving the problem.
By having 9 managers present their reports every week, 18 manager-hours are wasted every week. Almost none of this time is spent deciding issues.
So the weekly management meeting should be focused around the few decisions that cannot be made by individual managers. The written pack provided to all managers prior to the meeting contains all of the status information needed by managers.
Why most management meetings become status reports
Status updates feel productive as they ensure all teams and departments are covered. There is no risk in reporting out what happened, whereas decisions and actions have the potential to cause a lot of pain.
When a meeting is mainly for status updates, it’s usually even harder to bring up a problem that is situated between departments. For instance, a late order that’s a sales problem as well as an operations problem. It just falls between the slides.
Additionally there is the secondary cost of managers not bringing problems with them to the meeting because they are only discussed if there is time to deal with them at the end of the meeting.
A weekly management meeting agenda in five blocks
It is scheduled for 60 minutes each week, following the exact same sequence of topics each time.
•Numbers, 10 minutes. The company dashboard is distributed 24 hours prior to the meeting as the “pack” and discussed in this short session only for numbers that are off track and require discussion (i.e. “red”).
•Last week's commitments, 10 minutes. Recap of all commitments from previous meeting. Were they fulfilled? If not, when will they be?
•Issues for decision, 30 minutes. Management writes down a ranked list of all the issues needing a decision and distributes it the day before the meeting. Each issue should have an owner and include a recommendation. The most important issue comes first.
•Decisions and owners, 5 minutes. The agreed decisions are read out to establish who will be doing what by when. This will form part of next week’s commitments list.
•Message to the teams, 5 minutes. Here the manager can simply send the same message to the teams in the company and tell them how he sees things.
Three rules: (1) The pack goes out 24 hours before the meeting. (2) The meeting starts on time even if some people are not there. (3) No slides are allowed in the meeting. Something that needs a slide should have been included in the pack to be distributed 24 hours in advance. These rules form part of a general business management system and include measures that are tracked in this meeting and an authority map indicating who can decide what.
The Problem at the Root of Long Management Meetings – The CEO!
A large portion of discussions in typical management meetings consist of the CEO’s review of his or her direct reports. The CEO asks the questions, frequently interrupts the reports, and often expresses his or her point of view first on most issues discussed. Few individuals dare to disagree with someone who can affect their compensation.
As simple as this sounds it is very hard to implement. So issues for decision are discussed with the CEO speaking last, the owner of the issue presents his or her recommendations to which the other managers can pose questions and the CEO then makes his or her view known on the matter or even makes a decision.
How to tell whether your meeting works
Measuring your meeting as you would any process in your organization should only require four numbers to get you started.
•% of time spent discussing issues for a decision. Half or more is good.
•Decisions recorded per meeting, with owner and date.
•% of completed Commitments from the prior meeting by end of week. We use 80% as a threshold here, to detect over-promising by managers and / or a meeting assigning work that was not agreed upon by the team.
•Meetings that end on time.
In Strategic Planning and OKR Architecture we also stress to take fifteen minutes a week to check the progress of your strategic plans instead of spending ninety minutes in weekly meetings that don’t generate any decisions.
Take a look at the minutes of your last three management meetings and count up the number of decisions that were made with an owner and a date to implement. You need more than one hand to count them? Well, the meeting is working. You need none at all? Then the meeting was just a report.
