Podcast Episode 95 - The CEO Update
The CEO Update is the missing piece in the meeting rhythm puzzle. It's the 'glue' that aligns the entire business around the meeting rhythm of daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual meetings.
The little seeds you plant in people's minds can grow into massive old oak trees. The short weekly CEO Update should have the same impact.
In this week's podcast, Brad Giles and Kevin Lawrence discuss different ways to deliver a CEO update, and explain why it's so important and provide a sample agenda.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Please note that this episode was transcribed using an AI application and may not be 100% grammatically correct – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.
Brad Giles 00:13
Hi there. This week on the Growth Whisperers, we've had a problem with our video. Our apologies on this. So on the YouTube version, you're only going to see Kevin, and you're going to not see me. But trust me, my audio is there you can follow along. It's just that you get to enjoy Kevin's face a little bit more than usual, some of us that might be a benefit. Hope you enjoy this week's episode on Youtube.
Kevin Lawrence 00:39
Welcome to the Growth Whisperers podcast where everything we talk about is about building enduring, great companies, companies that last for decades, companies that you can look at and be proud of for hopefully generations to come, or at least generations of future leaders to come. I'm Kevin Lawrence. I'm here as always with Brad Giles, my co host on the show, Brad, how you doing today?
Brad Giles 01:01
I'm great, very good at this end, beautiful summer, everything is good.
Kevin Lawrence 01:07
And we've got a beautiful winter at our end, too. So we've got a great, interesting topic today the missing meeting that most people forget about. And it's a massive opportunity. We'll dig into that in a second. But before we do that quickly, what's your Word of the Day? Brad?
Brad Giles 01:25
Something that's on my mind is when you're going to engage with a person about a business subject, are they entertaining you? Or are they teaching you? I feel that there are some people who are entertainers. And there are others who were teachers, and there are others who are actually working on things and providing tools. So yeah, I don't know how I can I could spend an hour explaining that. But that's as good as I can do today. Kevin - teachers or entertainers.
Kevin Lawrence 02:05
Well, mine is actually "following the passion". And I was talking to someone the other day, and it was a someone, a younger teenager trying to figure out what to do in their career. And people are giving them all kinds of different advice. And mine was just like, follow what you're passionate about. Follow what it is that you like doing. And you're willing to work hard at it because it feeds you or fuels you in some way. Yeah. And the work itself out. But really, what are you passionate about a willing to put the energy into? So we could weave those together? You know, are you passionate about teaching? Are you passionate about entertaining? Are you passionate about something completely different? But yeah, following what you're passionate about, which generally means it gives you energy.
Brad Giles 03:02
So over the last few over the last five episodes or so we've been talking about the meeting rhythm that is the annual today strategy meeting, the quarterly execution planning meeting, the monthly leadership team meeting, the weekly meeting, the daily huddle. But there's something that's missing through our this, there's something that once you're doing it, once you start to apply this, it begins to kind of fill a gap that's not there for the organization. And so that's what we're talking about today, which is the CEO update that forms a critical part of the meeting rhythm to help everybody in the organization align, because the daily huddle does a great job of aligning, but this helps it even more. It helps everybody in the organization to understand what the priorities are, and also to build the pride in the organization and it helps the CEO in their ambassadorial role.
Kevin Lawrence 04:18
It was interesting as we were preparing for and talking about this Brad I was remembered back in the 90s when I started my career my gosh that's forever ago, started my career in advertising. There was a gentleman by the name of Peter Lake and I believe he's still around wonderful man. He started a company called Canada Wide magazines. They were big into the print magazine space, got a great magazine called BC business based out of Vancouver and we were connected to that organization through some charitable work I was doing which Peter was big into charity MC tons of events in Vancouver. Awesome guy, and he had a daily update. I'm sure it was daily now it might have been weekly or bi weekly. wrong, but I think it was a thought of the day that he would send out to his people back then. And I think back in the 90s, it might have been printed. Yeah, cuz now they're in a magazine content space. But and I saw some of these updates, and they were amazing it was a quote of the day was some thoughts and everything. And it was partially what inspired me when I started the daily newsletter that I used to have back then back in the late 90s, when I started my practice, and what the point of it is, is he was getting his people in sync and up to date continually with what's going on. And it was a really powerful mechanism he used as a form of his leadership. And that's kind of what we're talking about here.
Brad Giles 05:45
Yeah, yeah. It's a form of leadership. It's a form of reminding people. The quarterly, the annual, the monthly, the weekly, that's the leadership team. And that's important. And maybe you're even doing that in a form in the department that you work in. Certainly, daily, huddles are there. But this is a simple five minute update from the leader. Now, I'd advocate once per week, and I know that you would say that, perhaps once per month is appropriate. But what we're going to say is weekly or fortnightly or monthly, you've got to figure out if this is an example of best practice, how do you get this practice to work best in your organization to tailor it to suit yourself. But the point is that there is a regular rhythmic update from the leader that explains some of the simple mechanisms that are occurring in this sphere, some of the updates some of the priorities that are happening.
Kevin Lawrence 06:58
And in many ways, it's be being able to hear directly from the leader, you know, and to hear their thoughts because there's this thing called the telephone game, where you know, a CEO has a discussion with executives, executives, talk to directors, directors, talk to managers, managers, talk to assistant managers, assistant managers, talk to team leads, team leads, talk to team members. And the stories don't make it all the way there to begin with, they don't flow all the way always. And they also get changed as they should, as the managers put their own stamp onto this. This is a direct communication in the world of massive, easy communication, it's a no brainer. We have one of our clients right now that does a monthly version. And he has a great monthly version he does by video. And one of these he does, he's got his head of marketing and communications was an awesome guy, who the CEO and him sit and talk for a couple minutes about the messages. The CEO makes us notes that the head of the marketing group turns on the camera with just using their phone. Because the iPhone is an incredible media device. Yeah, records it. And then the marketing person hands it off to someone on the team, they do some quick edits, and then away they go post it up and away they go. And there's the CEOs monthly message. It's just it's, you know, it's really powerful. I mean, you could make an argument for a daily potentially at some point that might be a bit much, but it's just regularly doing it because it's, it's almost like there's no reason not to people just forget to and don't have a mechanism to get it done.
Brad Giles 08:29
Yeah, it's, it can be really easy. And as a byproduct, one of the things that I've noticed the leaders that I work with, who do it but notice, it kind of consolidates all of their thoughts, and it's a great way to round out a week by providing an update. Now, this shouldn't be really, I'd advocate for it should take five minutes to write. So this is a short, sharp, simple email. You know, most of the time when I've been coaching leaders who are doing this, my my, my regular thing is make it shorter, make it shorter, make it shorter, we always want to put too much, especially at the beginning put too much in but set the rhythm that is it's a handful of dot points, a couple of quick updates, what's on my mind, maybe a metric or two, maybe a shout out some of those kinds of things. It should take really five minutes, but no more than 10 to write. And it should take no more than five minutes to read because then it's digestible. And you know, if you get an if you're an employee who's disconnected from the leadership team, let's say so you're one or two or three levels away, and you get an email from the leader about, let's say, the state of the nation or what's happening. That's a pretty interesting if it's quick, a pretty interesting email.
Kevin Lawrence 10:02
If it's relevant to all people in the company, which can be challenging, so yeah, my recommendation for something like this example, the head of marketing comes in and records for the CEO, the CEO prepares for less than a minute. And they've been thinking about it during the week sometimes if they have had time, and it takes a couple minutes to record. And if you're gonna write it, some CEOs are excellent at writing, they can sit down and do that stuff. And most are so damn busy. So that's like, get their EA or get somebody else making it is to make it somebody else's job to get it out. You just happen to be the person providing the content, and you can be on your way to your kids soccer game. And your key person can contact you to get the key points if it's written in a written form that is and to pull the content from but the key is, make it somebody else's accountability that it happens. It shouldn't be yours.
Brad Giles 10:57
Yeah, but it's your thoughts. It's correct. What's happening. You know, what are you feeling sensing you what is your spidey sense, tell you is a good way to think about it.
Kevin Lawrence 11:11
It is one of the traps to avoid, as you know, the trap of the company newsletters trying to pull content from everybody know, trying to get the stories and the end and they start off strong. And then they often fall on their face. And the reality is in this, it shouldn't depend on anyone, if your executives happen to share stuff with you, you know, great if you you know, if you want to do shoutouts to people and talk about good stuff happening, it's wonderful. But you need to be able to have access to it and not be stuck getting stuck on it because people aren't telling you what you need to know. Yeah, by the way, it's kind of an interesting insight as if you're out of touch and don't know some of that stuff that might indicate that maybe you're not connected enough to the business. But the point of it is make it simple, and something that can be effective, without a whole bunch of other things to get in this way.
Brad Giles 12:01
I've got a client that I work with. And they are big into two net promoter and big into measuring employee satisfaction. And so when we started with them, they've done one or two or three runs that the leader had. And then they surveyed their staff. And it was overwhelmingly decided that this was something that was really valued by people, because they got to, you know, they got a bit of an exciting update as to what's going on. And there was it was short and sharp and sweet. And that's what really matters.
Kevin Lawrence 12:42
Yeah, and right to the point. So we talked about, you know, some things that it, I think, as you mentioned, it can align people to the objectives, you can be updated on objectives, you can do things in there to reinforce the culture, you can cover off things that will maybe even help people to perform or be on top of really critical things. And as we talked about, we're preparing is that the agenda can start off a lot like a daily meeting, Hey, what's up? Hey, here's the metrics, the first two points of the daily meeting, to share. But the idea here is it's not just to your direct team that's cascading to everyone. But then you might have some important messages or themes. Some companies run regular themes, or there's a major focus that everyone's aligned around, you might provide some updates on that, here's some things that have happened. Here's some highlights. Here's the division that's doing the best or some show notes to new ideas around that theme. But as an output, ideally, people come away with something to feel proud about. Proud to be on this team and what's happening in this team. And then also something to look forward to. Right, you know, that's, that's part of, of leadership is leaving their thoughts and, and having them think about where they're going to go or how it's going to be.
Brad Giles 14:04
Yeah, so I at a personal level, there's this simple philosophy I heard about 20 years ago. And that was everybody needs something to do someone to love and something to look forward to. And it's really playing on that mechanism in the way that you've just said. So, you know, we want to activate the pride, which is something to love, you know, activate the pride about our team, our product, our company, our leaders, whatever it might be, we want to try to use that mechanism, something to do you know, we want to make sure that people are aware that we're progressing and that there's still work to be done and then something to look forward to. So that we're able to It could be, it could be an expansion, it could be an acquisition, it could be a company picnic, it could be, you know, a whole range of different things that are coming up could be next week's update. But we're really, you know, we're thinking about it through that lens is that what's on your mind? How are we progressing on our company priorities, those types of things, any key metrics, and we don't want to see revenue metrics every single week, we don't want to say, imagine 15 weeks in a row where the only metric was, yes, we achieved budget this week, like make it a bit varied, make some interesting things.
Kevin Lawrence 15:49
You could break it up in one week reporting on something that has to do with culture, something else it has to do with efficiency, something else it has to do with one of the company goals, who knows, you can find ways to make it and if you're gonna break it up and do different metrics at different times, again, whoever you make accountable for it, have them to have a calendar. Okay, today reporting on this metric, and have them come with a data so you can you know, speak to it. But the point of it is you want to be reinforcing the things that matter most.
Brad Giles 16:18
And, and what's on your mind, like, it's really simple. It's a way to be authentic, vulnerable to build trust, if you like, yeah, this to some CEOs.
Kevin Lawrence 16:31
And by the way, this could apply to team leaders as well and have big teams. But you know, some, some CEOs are very open about what's going on in their world personally. And then some art. So that's a personal thing of what you're willing to share what you're not, some are very, you know, almost more secretive, and not open about it. But whatever your style is, share what's comfortable, and then what's going to align the team and help people to be able to be on board with the stuff that matters most again, feel proud and have some look forward to.
Brad Giles 17:09
Your update could be "I was really happy that we achieved our number two company priority this week". Yes. And congratulations to Shawn for his hard work in that area. So if everyone got that, first of all, Shawn is going to be pretty proud. But the Sean's team will be, there'll be a whole range of things that come of that. So you, it doesn't need to be like you said, she adapted to suit your personality style.
Kevin Lawrence 17:37
It could be, what's up a little bit of company news, a couple of key metrics that relate to your most important company goals, you could review progress on the company goals, and celebrate a few things that have actually happened. And then tell people but a couple things that are happening next week, you could be doing it every time you do it. And you could talk a little bit about one of the company values for a minute and reinforce one of the values and the story about it. Like it's, it's things to just keep grounding people in what matters most. Our culture, you know, you might have a big safety, focus in the organization, and maybe it's something around safety, our goals, um, and where we're winning, or anything else that they need to know. Again, it's, it's basic, but it's the discipline of a CEO to do it on a regular basis. Or team leaders leading big teams, just a very simple thing. And it's basically it's almost like the, it's the missing meeting rhythm that many people forget about, and the ability to impact the entire organization and have them think about the same thing.
Brad Giles 18:45
Yeah, people know what's going on. It's an amazing alignment tool. Okay. Yep. So. So just as a quick summary, then why does it matter? It helps to align the team to the company objectives, the performance, and also the culture. It's this kind of, in the same way that the daily huddle is a bit of a drumbeat. This is a secondary drumbeat. But from the leader, and it helps. It's it, the structure, it should be like the daily, again, what's up any metrics, important messages, something about the culture, don't make it too long. We want to have no more than five, maybe 10 minutes to write it and prepare for it. And it should take no more than five minutes to read it or watch it if you're using videos. And finally, you know, it can be a bit about thinking about the last week so some updates and a little bit about thinking about next week as well or next month depending on what you're doing. And finally, one last point, make it an interesting title. So you want it to stand out Add a little bit, or use the same title of the email subject, assuming you're using email each week. And that doesn't mean that you need to change the email title every week, it more means you just want to have something that when people see it if they're getting 100 emails a day it's going to stand out.
Kevin Lawrence 20:22
Yeah, well, that's the idea of the show. So we challenge you to what if, what if you were to do it weekly, great, bi weekly, monthly, whatever it is, what's the rhythm that you're going to communicate to every person and make your basic agenda like we talked about and get it started? Find someone on your team to support you and get it done. Another great tool, and it'll be well worth the time. So thanks for listening. This has been the Growth Whisperers Podcast. I'm Kevin Lawrence as always the Brad Giles for the YouTube version go to the growth whispers on youtube.com to reach us to subscribe to our newsletters or reach out to us. Brad is ever lar FLR evolution partners.com.au and Kevin is Lawrence and co.com. Hope you have an awesome week. And just remember the little bits of communication and little seeds you plant in people's mind can grow into massive massive old oak trees and that's a wonderful thing. Have a great week.
Podcast Episode 94 - The Daily Huddle
The daily huddle connects each day to the weekly meeting. When done correctly the daily huddle speeds up your business, aligns teams and heals relationships. But sometimes teams won't follow daily huddle best practices and end up with long or ineffective daily huddles.
The daily stand up meeting must be energetic and valuable to all participants. For most people, in 10 minutes or less you're getting the most important information and getting on your way.
In this episode, Brad and Kevin discuss why you need a daily huddle, what a daily huddle agenda must include, and tips for a successful huddle.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Please note that this episode was transcribed using an AI application and may not be 100% grammatically correct – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.
Brad Giles 00:13
Welcome to the Growth Whisperers where everything we talk about is building enduring great companies. My name is Brad Giles. And today, I'm joined as always, by my co-host, Kevin Lawrence. Hello, Kevin, how are things today with you?
Kevin Lawrence 00:28
Things are great. Up here in cold Canada, we've got a whack of snow and notably more snow, and notably more cold temperatures than we normally get. So, but a boy does make everything look beautiful. So I'm doing great.
Brad Giles 00:48
Good to hear. Well, obviously the opposite here. It's beautiful summer time here. And so as always, we like to start with a word or thought of the day. Kevin, what do you have today for us?
Kevin Lawrence 01:21
Yeah, cult like culture is kind of the phrase of the day, had dinner with friends tonight. And we got talking about a religion that won't be named, and their incredible cult like culture. And, you know, they've had some experiences with that particular thing to the point where there were some, some bad experiences they had when they decided that they were going to move on. And just the power and the grip that the culture had on the members of that community, and particularly him. And but we had a conversation after he shared a little bit of talking about how, you know, great companies find ways to bring people in and meet all of their needs, and they have the bonds and the relationships and all of the things like why would they want to go. And so if we take the healthiest part of cult like cultures, that is what a great community is, it's what a great company is. And, you know, in thinking about the companies that we work with, and think our own firm, you know, what does it take to have that cult like, culture?
Brad Giles 02:38
That's awesome. Yeah, culture. It's, it's so divisive for many people, but for many companies to get what they think might be right, maybe they think they've got a good one. But you know, having a conscious culture or consciously building the kind of culture that you work with, that you work with to build your strategy or that aligns with the needs of your strategy and your customer, when that's where the real gains are made, isn't it?
Kevin Lawrence 03:09
Yep, sure is. How about you? What's your word of the day?
Brad Giles 03:14
Yeah, so mine, funnily enough, was strategy. So yeah, some weird words there. But what's your strategy to build your culture? And, and that's, that's because it's something that you need to work on. It's something that you need to have, you know, consciously mapped out not just pictures, it was ironic that you said that that's why I loved at the time. But yeah, it's something that you need to have developed, like, even if you haven't mapped it out, like, what is the strategy for your culture? How are you going to build the kind of culture that will attract the top performers in your market? Something that, you know, I've certainly spoken about so much on this podcast?
Kevin Lawrence 04:02
Yep, for sure. So today we are talking and this is episode number 94. We're getting close to the magical 100th episode. Well, magical because in our mind, it's a milestone to cross. But today, we're talking about something really exciting. And it's, it's meant to be exciting and impactful on a daily basis for most people, Brad. So what is this episode about?
Brad Giles 04:30
Yeah, so over the last few weeks, we've gone through the annual meeting, the quarterly meeting, the monthly meeting, the weekly meeting, and today we rounded out with of course, the Daily Execution meeting. And this is the thing that kind of stitches it all together in terms of execution and something, something that people are very reluctant to do at the outset. So yeah, today we're talking about the daily huddle and how The Daily huddle weaves together, the weekly and the monthly and the quarterly and even the annual in terms of execution.
Kevin Lawrence 05:09
Awesome. And I will tell you, when I first start heard about daily meetings, I thought they were a little weird. And I thought that they were overkill, I was quite skeptical. And I will tell you, it's, you know, it's getting close to 20 years of using them with different clients. And from the first client I tested them on, they were amazingly impactful. And often, they don't work in companies. Yeah. And it's not that they don't work because they couldn't work. They don't work because people don't really understand them well enough, and to bring them to life, or they don't have the rigor or discipline to keep them going when it gets a bit bumpy, but hands down one of the most impactful meetings that you can have. And fascinatingly, it is a natural instinct to have a daily meeting when we get into crisis situations or problems. When things don't work well, with a goal. Let's just talk about this every day until we fix it. Excellent. And this is meant to be a proactive things to make sure things keep going well. And they're very impactful. We're going to dispel a few myths today give you a few strategies that we've seen companies use, but it is incredibly impactful meeting.
Brad Giles 06:23
So I'd heard about the daily huddles, I, you know, read about them, I'd seen others, but it really didn't seem very culturally appropriate for me. At the time, this was like 1718 years ago, and I took my leadership team to see a guy called Jack Dailey. You know, Jack, I know, Jack Dailey, one of the most fantastic sales trainers that you've you've ever heard of. And we came away, it was a full, intensive day with Jack. And we, I brought the leadership team way. And then I said, Okay, so what's the number one thing that we've got to do. And the leadership team said, hands down, at the same time, we've got to start doing daily handles, and that was the catalyst, I remember it as clear as day for us to start doing daily huddle, it was really it came from Jack. And so we started doing them. And I remember, I learned something every single day that I would never have learned otherwise, yes, about things that were happening in the business. And there was no other forum for that.
Kevin Lawrence 07:34
And that's the idea. It's the cross communication across all the different channels and pieces of the business so that people know what's going on at once. And instead of 10 separate conversations at the old version, you know, at the water cooler, or SMS messages these days are virtual meetings. It's everyone's in one loop to get in sync. And it's almost like the, you know, the brief that a team has before they're going out onto the field in many ways. You imagine a sports team, everyone just kind of rolls in shows up at the game and then goes out on the field. They don't get in sync before they go to their job. It doesn't make sense. Interestingly, I am, we are up at a place called Kelowna BC on vacation, which I remember not far from there right now. And with my son, and he was like seven years old, and we go into a Walmart store. And I see people in a circle talking. So we go to the aisle behind so we can kind of listen and you know, on their daily huddle, and they went through all the things that's going there, they had their lists that their agenda that they went through. And at the end, they sang the Walmart song. And there is a Walmart song and they were singing this song. And everyone's awkward and goofy. And I went up and I talked after to the manager and one of the people I'd seen in the meeting and asked him about it. And they said, look, they do it once a day, sometimes twice. And they move it around the store physically so that they can include different people on different days because people still well the store is running, they're doing the meeting. And I said and I said to them, you know, why does it work so well because everyone knows everything that's going on. We know if there's a shipment coming in and we need some more people in the back. It gives us all our plan for the day. It creates recognition opportunities in their culture. They say okay, what tell me about the damn song. And the lady with his big goofy smiles like well, you know, it's a little awkward, but tell you what, we come away feeling really, really good and then we get on with our day. So I'm not saying you need to do a song yet God has no do not say that Kevin said to do that because some people will not enjoy it. But it's a point of unification and bringing people together and it's insanely powerful.
Brad Giles 10:01
Yeah. So the daily huddle. I mean, the real base concept is that if you get the daily huddle, right, it should save one hour per day of tiny interactions, or updates, or emails or access meeting times.
Kevin Lawrence 10:29
So really, whilst we're advocating that you need to have another meeting, what we're really saying is that you're eliminating 10 meetings or an hour of wasted time?
Brad Giles 10:33
Yeah, yeah. So if you can look at it, inversely, rather than adding, saying the reason we're doing it is to take away, you can come at it from a different perspective and a different set of thinking.
Kevin Lawrence 10:45
And that works. If you follow the agenda and everything everyone learns to bring all the data to the daily meeting that they need, versus Talking to you afterwards. And if someone brings up something that should have been shared at the daily with the team, it's like, Hey, make sure you're bringing that to the daily tomorrow. Yeah. And training everyone that that is that central communication channel on a daily basis for stuff that would impact everyone versus the one on ones which people sometimes default.
Brad Giles 11:16
Yeah. And remember, this is daily, so it's probably four days per week, knowing that on the fifth day, you might have a weekly meeting, that's got an asterix on it, because it depends on the team that for example, the Walmart team may or may not that you mentioned may or may not have a weekly, so they might have five dailies depends, but for the average small to medium sized business in the leadership team, perhaps you're only going to have four dailies, and then one weekly, it's like
Kevin Lawrence 11:44
Monday, you'd have your weekly and then Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, if you work on Monday to Friday, a week, then you'd have your dailies on those other days just to keep things moving along and staying on track.
Brad Giles 11:54
Yeah, you catch up on those things in for sure.
Kevin Lawrence 11:57
So the key also with a daily meeting is it's meant to be seven to 12 minutes. Now, when we were doing the scaling up book, Vernon, I had a debate about it. And I think it should be seven to 10 minutes. 12 minutes creeps a little bit longer. So I am as we debate it, say the 12. But it I say 10 minutes, max, because once you start creeping over 10 minutes, you can easily turn to 20. And here's the number one way to have an ineffective daily meeting is to go longer than 10 or 12 minutes, yep. Because if you do, it starts becoming 20 minutes or half an hour, people start devaluing it, and saying we shouldn't do it, it's not valuable. And they're right, it's not worth half an hour a day, unless you're, you know, in an ER room or some environment where that meeting has a lot more meat to it. And is it has some deeper diagnostics or things like that. But generally for most people, under 10 minutes, you're getting the most important information and getting on your way.
Brad Giles 13:03
Well, as soon as it goes to 20 or 25 minutes, everyone, it significantly impacts someone's day, in 10 minutes, it's like you can catch up on that. And it's a lot easier pill to swallow.
Kevin Lawrence 13:20
It is an impact someone's day, you're also going to be boring someone to tears, because there's not 30 minutes of things that involve everybody in the room. And again, unless there's some incredible crisis, but even then the that's not the intent of the meeting, it's a pulse, making sure that we're on track, making sure that we have what we need, making sure we don't need to do something important or sensitive of the state to be able to be effective.
Brad Giles 13:45
So if we go back to the annual helps us to set strategy, the quarterly execution meeting helps us determine the quarterly execution plan. And we spoke about that a couple of episodes ago. And then we go to the monthly, and then we go to the weekly. And so in the weekly, what we're really saying is, this is how I'm going to execute this 1/13 of this quarterly plan, or this is where I'm at in terms of my quarterly progress. And so that's what the that's part of what the daily huddle is also doing. It's saying, am I likely to achieve? Or am I on track for this week's plan? Because that's a week's plan is a part of the quarterly plan.
Kevin Lawrence 14:31
Yeah, so it's basically making sure that I we have an effective day and one of the questions the third, for the fourth thing that we do the third thing we talk about in the agenda is about making sure you have everything you need to have a successful day. And it's critical to make sure that you're having a great day. So let's jump in to the agenda itself - it's three questions. And then sometimes people will customize it and add something else. And be Be careful about adding too much like a lot of things you can do. But the first thing is, it's two words with a question mark. It's what's up? What's up? What's up? So and again, if you've got people their ideas, you ideally, you go around the room and hear from every person I call the daily meeting, circling three times, we circle with Question one, we circle with question two, and we go around the whole circle for Question three, it's an efficient way to do it. And for speed, and it also makes sure everybody participates. Now, if you get into 50, people, if you have all hands, or everyone in the office 50 person meeting slightly different. But for a team that this is, you know, the executive team, or the marketing team, or the accounting team, whatever it happens to be. What's up? And basically, what's up is what's going on today, that we should all know about. Now, maybe it's just something exciting. You want to share. Maybe it's you know, the queen is going to be touring the office today. There's a special new product getting launched, or who knows what, there's a power outage, just what's going on, that we need to be aware of in our day.
Brad Giles 16:23
And it's not micromanaging. This is a real trap app in the WhatsApp section. Because yes, some people and be in a leader or a worker, they might think that what's up means, what am I working on today? How am I you know, my boss is giving
Kevin Lawrence 16:39
Think of a briefing of a military to a military commander with the team? What's going on? What do we need to be aware of? That's happening, right? So it's real straightforward. And there's always now some companies also the base question, what's up? Some people will modify this and say, you know, what's up? Or what's, uh, when something good that's happening? Yeah. Some companies will do, you know, what's, what's up here and what's up in your life. Like, they will bring a personal component in for bonding, and again, do what you want, but it's a bring to the table, the important things that we should all be aware of.
Brad Giles 17:29
And there could be good and bad things. It's not only you know, I remember I worked with one team. And they were, they use the phrase energy up. And so he had to only bring things that were positive. And it's like, maybe the house is burning down. But you know, it's good.
Brad Giles 17:57
Yeah. So it's just what's up broadly, what's going on. And one of the keys is that it should be short and sharp, knowing every team's got a different size. But knowing that we've got to get through all of the people knowing that no one wants to stand there listening to anyone for a long period of time, make it short, sharp, succinct, and look out for the people. I'm going to just say this, right, who might be a little bit lower on the EQ scale, or might want to, let's just say, give you a status update of everything so that they look good. Like, you got to give them better coaching.
Kevin Lawrence 18:41
It's that's the single most important thing that you need to share one, not a shopping list. Yep. Perfect. All right. Speaking of being short and sharp, let's go to the next one. The second is your daily metric. Most companies will have 345 metrics or KPIs that if they pay attention to it gives them a good pulse of the business. And this is about having daily data so that you can make some adjustments. Or maybe you need to have a special meeting after the meeting, if something's either really good, or really bad. And you know, there's a couple different ways people will do this. In some companies, they go around the room for people that own one of those key metrics. Some companies get each person to report a metric. But generally, a lot of companies will have a whiteboard or a digital whiteboard, where they have those top three to five numbers. And then the owners, the owner of those numbers, each number reports on it and tells us the update.
Brad Giles 19:41
And this is an easy one for teams to skip if they don't have sophisticated reporting, but I would still encourage you to use that time for some kind of daily metric in some form. So that could be I mean, they might say for example, we get we close it up At the end of the month, and so then a few days after that, we'll have some kind of numbers to discuss, well, you got to kind of look beyond that. Now, obviously, an easy one is sales, what were the sales numbers for yesterday should be pretty easy to track. And that might be great and easy for the sales team or sales person. But you can switch out numbers each day. So maybe on Monday, you could talk about, you can have team members talk about one form of sales, a leading indicator or a lagging indicator. And then in accounting, you could have the five top key performance indicators. And then on Monday, they report on one and then Tuesday a different one. So he's really switched it up. It doesn't need to be only talking about my KPI because the first thing that many people say around the daily metric is, yeah, but I only get my numbers weekly, or I only get my numbers monthly or something like that. What do I say the other four days, so find different KPIs to try
Kevin Lawrence 20:57
And if you only get your numbers monthly, that's financials, there's lots of operational KPIs. And every business and bigger businesses, this is easier, bigger businesses, there's a lot more data and a lot more moving parts. But that example, Brad that you gave was a great one of okay, Monday's report sales. Two, we report a day Tuesday report a customer feedback, three, report, day three, report inventory. Day number four, we report, cash conversion cycle. Yeah, and day number five, we report meal production and or production of customers needed, or shipping of what customers needed, and what percent of what they needed division, whatever it is. But so basically, you can report all the numbers every day, if there's enough going on in business, or you just report on a different number every day, the key is to stay connected to the numbers that are meaningful in the business.
Brad Giles 21:46
All of that is that the customer pays me is that the other team members, they get educated on what matters. So if we say we're super, like, we've got real problems, we're really red on this area. Everyone in the team learns every time you talk about the numbers.
Kevin Lawrence 22:07
And it also that everyone stays focused on what matters because those key numbers are what matters. Yes. And so and it directs your attention to that versus maybe we need to get a new brand of coffee in the coffee machine, which maybe you still do. Okay, so agenda point number one, what's up? Number two is the daily metric or metrics? And then number three, which is a little isn't there's different versions, but it's basically where or are you stuck? Or another version is, you know, what do you need to make sure you have a productive day? Or what do you need assistance with? The question where you're stuck is excellent. But some people have a psychological block around it. People don't like to admit that they're stuck. But the idea is, what's something that would be in your way for accomplishing what you need to accomplish today and having a productive day?
Brad Giles 23:05
Yes, yes. And there's always something I've, I've seen accounts payable and receivable, people who can sometimes can push back against the daily huddle, and I love them. Don't get me wrong, but they're like, ah, you know, there's we're not really into the daily huddle. We do the same thing all day every day. And it's like, yeah, but where are you stuck? Like, what are the problems? They go, Oh, well, Company X isn't paying their bills, or, you know, I've got? And so that's an example where if they brought that up, somebody else who deals with Company X might be able to say, I know them really well, I'll give them a call. Yes, is it kind of things that can free up the bottlenecks where other people, you just might not know that, and there's no other forum in which to do that?
Kevin Lawrence 23:56
Right. So there's two things sometimes things that you're stuck on are things that you can fix yourself and just thinking about it and articulating it benefits you. Sometimes that's an opportunity for a colleague to help you. For example, I worked with a large Auto Group, a multi brand Auto Group in another country. And I remember that the CEO of that business, there was a substantial business loved the daily meeting. Once I got him to start doing it. He says one of the best things he ever did. And he gave me an example of one of the meetings, there's the guy who ran a Jaguar brand, and it was saying we're stuck. I got these four units, I can't move. It's last year's model. I need to move them the new ones are here this week, we got to do something. And a guy on the other side of the room who's actually responsible for doing buy those, you know what? I think I know somebody will take them someone just asked me for something. And I think this could fit the bill. So again, just in one meeting, they move for units that were stuck, like dead stock.
Brad Giles 24:59
You know, a really cool take on the stock concept that I've seen before was I think it was Spotify. At Spotify, they work in small teams, let's say of four or five people. And they work in clusters of workstations, and at each cluster, they had to whiteboard adjacent and they always had to write where they were stuck on the whiteboard nearby. Yeah, so everyone always knew where each of the teams were stuck as they walked by, and all the team members knew what they were stuck on. It's as much as it is important. For other people to know that and potentially fix it, it's good for you to know, because it's an opportunity for you to prioritize that stuck item.
Kevin Lawrence 25:47
Because it burns up a lot of energy when you're stuck on anything to go lateral, when you could be finding a way to go forward. Alright, let's move on the next point, and there's different add ons people have done. I've seen people do joke of the day. You know, we've also we brought that we've seen other people do word of the day, I've seen a one company where it was in the Middle East, and they did the Arabic word of the day, everyone was English speakers, there was one member on a team that spoke Arabic and or a country that speaks Arabic. And so everyone was learning a new Arabic word every day. So there's tons of different iterations or add ons, people have done a ball beyond those three questions,
Brad Giles 26:34
but don't let it go past 10 - 12 minutes.
Kevin Lawrence 26:38
Exactly, which is the danger of adding anything else. So we got three things. what's up daily metric, where you're stuck of three things, and feel free to do other things around it. But if you get away from those three, it just gets riskier.
Brad Giles 26:55
They're all there for a reason, I've seen another one, which is the opportunity of the die. So anyone bringing any but you know, like what these things are designed to speed up the business to free up, as we said earlier, about an hour a day, they're designed to align the team bring everyone together into this regular pulse. Also, they heal relationships, they if you've got two team members that are there, who maybe had a bit of a conflict or a bit of an issue, by virtue of the fact they've got to come together and share these three items, it can heal relationships over time, in a way that you may not anticipate.
Kevin Lawrence 27:42
And it also creates some psychological safety because you're feeling tighter and emotionally connected with these people. And it reminds you that your team and you feel more like a team by sharing, especially for sharing the stuff that's going well and the stuff that's not going well. And at the end of the day, we're humans and we're part of a tribe, right. And we like to be part of a tribe and it connects people in a way where things flow much more quickly. And if you want to speed up something in your company, have a daily meeting, the daily meeting moves things quicker, because of the relationship and the trust. And all those other ingredients just move things along. It's very, very, very, very hard.
Brad Giles 28:25
I think it's important to also make a note that the leaders should take a backseat in the daily huddle, they should be just a participant, and you want to get someone who's very well organized, is going to you know, yell out it's time for the huddle, when the time pops up, is going to get people organized. Like it's the leaders role is participant only in the daily huddle. It's not to be the organizer.
Kevin Lawrence 28:54
I think it's very effective when that happens. And because that person it needs to be run, like you're gonna dry and not and please like I've seen the Oh, everyone takes a turn running the daily huddle. That generally isn't a great thing. Running meetings is a skill not not not something that everyone gets, you could do that. It just know that it's very dangerous, because a lot of people can't run them well. And a week of poorly run meetings can become very, very painful.
Brad Giles 29:22
Yeah, I guess you know, a couple of other things is you want status, not solutions, because what always happens in daily huddle, someone says, oh, look, you know, I have you thought about doing this, or have you tried that?
Brad Giles 29:51
It's only status...
Kevin Lawrence 29:53
unless the building is on fire. The Answer is Okay, excellent, Jack and Federico, could you talk about that afterwards and come back and see me or bring it to tomorrow's meeting you, you notice someone's going to deal with it, but it ain't happening now. That's either on their own time or after the meeting. So you don't bore everyone else with the details. They just don't need to know.
Brad Giles 30:23
Yeah, yeah. Because they don't need to know it. They need to know the status. So think of it like a, you know, a verbal dashboard, if you will, of the team. And someone needs to be accountable to tell people, okay, can you guys take it offline? Someone needs to keep that flow path.
Kevin Lawrence 30:43
And that's the person that drives the media need to be good at, hey, can you do that offline? Hey, can you do that tomorrow? Hey, do you want to stay for a few minutes after and protecting it? So you stay to the 10 minutes? Yeah, another couple of key things too, is that standing up, when you stand up, things happen faster, specially if you're in a meeting where you sit down in a chair, and you relax. And by the way, it's also a great technique to end a phone call. If you're on a phone with a long talker, and they won't, he can't get off the phone, if you actually stand up, it's easier to end the call. Because it changes your energy, your energy, you actually get more energetic when you stand. A couple other things is using a timer. Special when you get going, you need to use a timer and onto the timer. And if you're aiming for 10 minutes, you might set it for nine and then you got to buffer. When we run meetings and we're tight on time the timers are magic. And then the final thing is that the person leading the meeting needs to be prepared. This is take a couple minutes to get themselves organized. And that's a basic for meetings. But it applies to this one too.
Brad Giles 31:52
But it's okay. For to your earlier point. I think it's okay to make a quick comment that people can dial in by phone or zoom as well to daily huddle. Just because we work in a remote world. Nowadays, there's no reason that you can have daily holes. I've got many teams that I work with that do daily huddles at the same time. And it's just a dial in meeting.
Kevin Lawrence 32:16
Yeah, people just dial in. Actually, in many cases, it's more efficient than even again, depends on your company and your structure. Just to kind of wrap up, I'll share a quote from a CEO worked with Vancouver. His name was Roger Hardy. And he built a company called Kosta contacts. And when I interviewed him for the scaling up book, we talked about the huddles, and he said, you know, he said, Kevin, it's like brushing my teeth. You know, it's one of these things, if you know, I don't realize how important it is until I miss a day. Yeah. And he said, For him, it was just a basic of how he run his business. He could be in sync with his executive team who were in sync with their teams. And it just, it allowed him in 10 minutes a day to do his job really, really well. And when he didn't do it, it he felt like he was disconnected from the business. It was a big, big gap.
Brad Giles 33:07
Yeah. Yeah. Good stuff. Good stuff. Well, do you want to move to wrap it up?
Kevin Lawrence 33:14
Let's do that. So the idea here is that basically, it's seven to 12 minutes, ideally, under 10 minutes is a good rule of thumb, leave yourself a little buffer there, to get everyone on track and focus for the day, and the whole team in sync with the intent of getting things to move along faster. Because we're all in absolute harmony and walking lockstep with each other. Again, it's not rocket science, when things get weird. We intuitively think that we should have a daily meeting to get things back on track. We're just doing it practically. And Brad, you want to roll through the agenda?
Brad Giles 33:50
So we begin it's three questions, make it simple, make it short, make it a status update. So the first one is, what's up two words, what's up, status update for you, your role, your area, daily metric, we spoke about the numbers that you need to bring in how there's different variations that you can do on that depending on your role. And then where are you stuck, everyone gets stuck. If you're not stuck, then you probably might not be doing work. If you keep not getting stuck regularly, until everyone gets stuck and unsure. You can get a leaf pass once in a while, but everyone gets stuck. So with that very simple agenda that kind of rounds out what we've got to do. There are other things you can do in there. But you know, exercise caution when you're bringing things in because the absolute, the absolute is you've got to keep it under 10 to 12 minutes. And so yeah, that's kind of where we're at. We went through those other things. So with that, let's move to close Kev. This has been the daily huddle this round. At the meeting rhythm, the series that we've done over the past few weeks, again, and you will quarterly monthly, weekly, and then and then daily. And this is the essence of really a great execution foundation.
Kevin Lawrence 35:15
You can do this yeah. And in this case, you know, we're looking at it's 10 minutes a day with your team to be in sync and focused and flushing out obstacles, weekly 60 to 90 minutes to focus and reset around the company goals. You're trying to achieve that quarter, monthly, a half a day to a day to dig deeper on strategy, get in sync around some education and become a more capable team. Quarterly reset, review how you performed, reset your goals for the next 90 days. And then annually, zoom out and look at the whole thing. Look at your strategy and all of your pieces of what you're doing. And the daily is that you know, that foundational piece that you're going to do a couple 100 times a year that helps you to be more successful. So thank you guys for listening today. This has been the growth whisperers podcast with Brad Giles and Kevin Lawrence. For the YouTube version or the video version, go to youtube.com Look for the growth whispers and to subscribe to our newsletters individually, or contact either one of us you can reach Brad at evolution partners.com.au and Kevin at Lawrence and co.com. Have a wonderful week.
Podcast Episode 93 - The Weekly Meeting
The weekly meeting is key to successful execution. It is where the leadership team takes strategy developed at an annual meeting, which is then translated into a series of priorities at a quarterly meeting, and then organizes the team to execute the priorities through accountability and updates at the weekly meeting .
Your weekly operational meeting helps you to stay focused on what matters most. And it’s a key time to come together and get synced, and deal with what’s most important.
Many teams feel that they already have too many meetings. But the weekly meeting - within the meeting rhythm - is designed to significantly reduce the number of extra, unexpected meetings leaders need to have.
In this episode, Brad Giles and Kevin Lawrence discuss why you need a weekly meeting, what a weekly meeting agenda must include, and tips for a successful weekly meeting.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Please note that this episode was transcribed using an AI application and may not be 100% grammatically correct – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.
Brad Giles 00:13
Hello there, welcome to the Growth Whisperers where everything we talk about is building enduring great companies. Companies that will endure, companies that will achieve greatness. Today, as always, I’m joined by my co host, Kevin Lawrence. Kevin, how are you doing today?
Kevin Lawrence 00:35
Doing great, Brad. I’m I love talking about meetings. I love talking about effective meetings, and I’m really looking forward to this today.
Brad Giles 00:42
Yes, the weekly meeting is such an important topic – looking forward to it myself. And so as always, one of the things we encourage people to do is to open meetings with a word or phrase of the day. Kevin, what might be on your mind in terms of the word or phrase for today?
Kevin Lawrence 01:02
Today, it’s stimulants. Now, not in the pharmaceutical or drug type, stimulants, but stimulants being things that open up different parts of your brains to different things, and how important it is to always be out there seeing learning, connecting different thoughts, so that your brain continues to see different ways of doing things and opening up doors in your brains to new possibilities. So stimulants in all kinds of different forms that open up your brain and for me, you know, going to a new city, learning something new, or meeting somebody new, they’re all you know, wonderful stimulants for my creativity and having an impact on having a better life. And, and thriving at work as well.
Brad Giles 01:52
For myself, it’s not so much a word or a phrase, I’ve just been thinking about this book, The Seven Hidden Reasons Employees Leave by Les Brown. And now we spoke about that in an episode four or five months ago. But yeah, like, the there’s been a lot of talk lately about the great resignation, whether it’s true or not, and how it works, and so forth. But, you know, one of the things that I specifically love in that book by Les Brown, and is that why do what’s the reason that managers think employees leave? And it’s like, 91% of people think it’s because of money, but then why the employees actually leave? It’s like, 92%, not money.
Kevin Lawrence 02:41
Yes. So amazing book, it’s one of my favourite books. It’s not widely known. But wow. And I use it in every meeting, I was in a meeting recently with a team. And we go in through we look at retention of our great players. And you know, there was three great players that had left this company. And I turned to the person who reports Okay, so do you know why they really left? And he started to speak and he just shakes his head. And so we go through the here’s the thing around money. But when we look at the seven hidden reasons, when we dug into it, here is actually why they left and we had a good chuckle. But, you know, it’s an amazing book, seven hidden reasons employees leave. So mine was, you know, stimulants and how they have so stimulants and seven hidden reasons people leave Brad. So it’s, you know, what are the stimulants that can create engagement or create departure? Because it’s, you know, there’s different things that stimulate people in their job and make them feel good. And then they’re stimulants and make you feel bad. I don’t know. I’m really stretching this one maybe. Let’s move on.
Kevin Lawrence 04:34
For the leadership team, it has to be it’s a critical meeting. It’s so it’s your weekly operational meeting that helps you to stay focused on what matters most it’s, it’s so darn important. And they by nature can be very excruciating. So let’s dig into the key thing and this is a 60 to 90 minute maximum meeting every week with you and your team. So we’re talking about the one with the CEO and the exec team. But it could be if you’re the head of marketing, it could be you and your direct reports. And it’s the key time that you all come together and get synced and deal with what’s most important.
Brad Giles 05:21
Here’s another way to think about it. So, about four or five weeks ago, remember, we had that quarterly off site? And we said that these are the most important thing. Yeah. For the business. How are we going in relation to that? How are we tracking? We said, we’re going to do those things. How’s that going? And rinse and repeat that conversation yet, same weeks until the next quarterly.
Kevin Lawrence 05:46
And Brad, you’ve touched on the greatest value of the weekly meeting and the primary purpose, don’t forget the freakin goals. Yeah, remember, we set those goals, we spent two days together setting these most important goals, this is our time to be reminded of them, and to be making sure that we’re making progress on them. And if not, pull up our socks and get them done. So the ideal is not to deal with all the traffic and the noise and all that stuff. It’s not a biggest problems meeting, it’s make sure we hit the damn goals meeting. And then the whole meeting is structured around that. Make sure that we hit the goals and we calibrate and make sure we’re not missing anything else major in the business. But it’s not a weekly problem meeting, it’s a weekly let’s get refocused or recalibrated. So we win by achieving our major goals meeting.
Brad Giles 06:37
Yeah, I remember there was a started to do a bit of work with a multinational engineering firm. And they would have people fly from four continents to come together for a meeting on a regular basis. And I know this is about the weekly, but I said to them, so you know, what is the agenda? How does it work? And it was 100% operational. There was nothing about strategy and nothing about priorities. And they didn’t have weekly meetings. And that absence meant that they were, you know, I’m not going to say just fumbling that we’re doing okay. But that would just stuck in the cogs.
Kevin Lawrence 07:12
They’d be living Groundhog Day again, and again, and again. Because if you don’t do something different, ie lay down a better foundation or improve a strategy or improve a process, the same junk keeps coming up. Yeah, yeah, man, we’re passionate about this one.
Brad Giles 07:28
Yes, we’re, here’s our passionate, we’ve got a few episodes as reference points. Number one, episode 58. collective intelligence, we’re going to talk about that in a moment. It’s the key to a successful weekly meeting. Next is Episode 43, the top seven best practices for weekly meetings. And then finally, Episode 20. How to make weekly meetings more effective. So yeah, we’re passionate about it. Because this is, this is how you execute or how best you execute your quarterly goals. And your quarterly goals is what gives you momentum and traction.
Kevin Lawrence 08:02
Yep, absolutely. So it’s an absolutely critical meeting, often misunderstood, mis managed, you know, the ones are the worst. It’s, I call them the fall asleep meetings, or get your email done meetings, where people are just rambling on giving their update reports, and you can’t blame them, because they’re just doing what they think they should. And that means the person that’s in charge of the meeting and running the meeting has failed them, because they’re just bringing what they think is important. And yet, it ain’t the most important thing. So let’s jump into the meeting. And you know, and one of the things I want to start with our team, we have our weekly meeting, we have hours an hour and 15, every Monday evening, and they end up happening probably 11 to 12 times a quarter, because if there’s a holiday, we don’t do them, we skip it that week. That’s where our team does it. Some move it to a different day. But we also start off with something that’s both a win and positive. Yeah. And a question where everyone’s got a different start. But our team is, you know, we only get to see each other once a year, because we’re, you know, distributed around the country, again, once from Canada at this point. But we have to talk about what’s the highlight? What’s a highlight? And how does it relate to the core values. So we’re bringing that positive as part of our check in, we also actually rate where we’re at zero to 10. So people can kind of really tell the truth about where they’re at in their world. So where are you at? What’s the wind? And then we have a question every week we have these thing called coach piggeries that our team created. It’s a Lawrence & Co thing we’ve got which has got a different question to answer. And everyone you know, goes around answers that so we just it’s a chance to connect a little bit and that’s not for everyone. That’s how we do it to really get the meeting grounded and positivity and connection with each other. That’s a starting point is something to set the right tone for the meeting. And then And then really digging into the first thing is, you know, are we on track? You know, for this month’s plan, which is are numbers and KPIs that’s what we’re trying to do initially, you know, in many companies might have a mini financial review, you know, maybe a revenue and a unit type number that we give them a sense, and any operational KPIs that are critical. Just seeing how is the business tracking? To make sure we don’t have an ugly surprise at the end of the month?
Brad Giles 10:19
No, we don’t want any surprises. So what’s red? What’s Amber? What’s green? How are we tracking? And, and that might create other questions at the collective intelligence part later on in the meeting? Correct. So why is it that sales keeps dropping, you know, three to 5%, every week, this is we’re gonna dig into this or whatever it might be. But point being, we’re starting with good news, then we’re moving on to the numbers, some hard stuff to get through and so that everyone is on the same page, then. Then we’re moving on to I’ve lost my place, then we’re moving on to the quarterly priorities. Are we on track for this month plan? So where are we at in terms of the quarterly priorities that we’ve set for the company? Now? We’ve got slightly different, slightly different way that each of us does this. So for you, Kevin, I understand that primarily at the weekly, you’ll be advocating that people only working on the top three to five priorities for the company and giving a status update on that.
Kevin Lawrence 11:33
Yeah, we normally a lot 10 minutes to the agenda maximum. And it’s okay. What are some progress you’ve made on that quarterly priority? Again, this happens every week, where might you be stuck and need some assistance? And then what are you going to do next? So with those five priorities in five to 10 minutes maximum, we can have them all completely reviewed, and know that we’re on track or know what we’re going to do to recalibrate to get on track?
Brad Giles 12:00
Yeah, yeah. So slightly different view, slightly different view on this, I’m advocating that teams would go through the, the generally the quarterly priorities, so each person would have one, maybe two minutes to say, I’m on track. For number one, I’m behind on number two, I’ve completed number three, or whatever. And let’s be really clear, this is a status update. And then that may create who what wins are separate meetings have a separate chance, we’ll let something spin down into collective intelligence. But this is a status update. This is not about solving problems at that point.
Kevin Lawrence 12:54
And to get clear, you know, so in the case, we’re moving the company, one’s an example I work with, you know, it’s 10 minutes, and we’re reviewing five goals. It’s very, very quick. And people might provide a little bit of extra context. But in 10 minutes, we’re through everything. And Brad’s would go even quicker, because in 10 minutes, they’re coming in to company five, plus the individual or the department vibes. So it has to be very succinct this. So basically, there’s no time to bore people to tears.
Brad Giles 13:25
Yeah, so what I advocate people do is say last seven, next seven. So I love that model company priority one, this is what I did in the last seven days. This is what I need to do in the next seven days. So because in terms of pure accountability, it’s quite difficult when every week you have a documented thing that said, I did nothing in the last seven days, I did nothing in the last seven days, I did nothing. You know, after a while, that gets a bit frustrating for the rest of the team.
Kevin Lawrence 13:54
Yeah, and my case, as I showed it would be the progress, where might he be stuck in what’s next similar model, same type of thinking. And if you have no progress to report just like you, that means nothing happened in the last seven. Yeah, so that is a critical piece to review. And then we get into any customer or employee data that we might have. So again, what are we hearing anything different from any customers or employees? And, you know, it might be about key hires, or someone getting on board. But you know, we got to pay attention to those two key stakeholders that we’re constantly trying to manage. Again, pretty straightforward. We want to have a little bit of data and then and then we drop into the big value of we call collective intelligence, what are those strategic discussions or debates that we’re going to deal with, and it’s 3045 60 minutes of the team coming together around something. So interestingly, with our internal team, again, we take the same framework, but what we do is, is once a week we have collective intelligence, and it could be someone presenting a project that has to do with a coordinate prayer. He’s like a deeper dive saying, Hey, here’s the model and gathering feedback, we’re building some new models around people and strategy that we’re getting feedback around. Well, then we alternate it that every second week, it’s education, because we’re a learning organization. And so there was a bit of training every second was a one week is strategic discussions, deep ones. And this alternating ultimate week is learning where someone from the team is teaching something else. And then we always have room for little tactical things that need to get addressed. Right. And it’s like a short term, hey, people need to be aware of something or I need some assistance on short term tactical stuff. All in that collective intelligence timeframe. Again, it’s not that we recommend to everyone does learning every couple of weeks, most organizations aren’t, you know, coaching and consulting firms and don’t need to do that. Or that might not be in their DNA to do that much of it.
Brad Giles 16:02
There’s usually enough topics that the team needs to debate that can be handled the weekly meeting anyways, what matters is the timing. So we would encourage people to be very disciplined, for example, review of the numbers you want 10 minutes only, yes, not 11, not 12.
Kevin Lawrence 16:17
Not the 47 page deck, the CFO has no and not even the 15 minutes on the one page that the people would want to tell you it’s time short time, and often using a timer to assist.
Brad Giles 16:33
A good healthy team member doesn’t need to spend 20 minutes telling you in a subverted manner, why they’re a good, you know why they’re performing? Well. It’s just like, Yeah, I’m great. I’m executing.
Kevin Lawrence 16:48
That’s what they think they’re supposed to do. And they have the bad habit of the long update. But yes, most people like to be synced, but cultures are rode into these crazy long presentations.
Brad Giles 17:00
So when we say one to two hours in terms of timing, that depends on the size of the business and what works. But when you set the time don’t go over. So when we’re looking at the review of the numbers, or the review of the priorities, or even the collective intelligence of the customer, employee data, have a time allocated for that agenda item. And don’t go on, like we need to stick to the timings to have an effective meeting.
Kevin Lawrence 17:28
Yep. And these things need to be reset. We just updated our team’s weekly agenda, we made some tweaks to make it suit us. And we reset the time, we actually shaved 15 minutes off it which most the time that we’re able to do, but it takes discipline. And generally, the weekly meeting needs a regular tune up, you have to keep refining it to keep it working. Because when operates the same way for a long time, most companies they seem to degrade or erode. So if yours is a little rough, don’t worry about it. Pull the agenda, get a couple people to work on it, tighten it up a little bit, and reset it. And away you go and dial it back into being a great meeting again.
Brad Giles 18:08
Yeah, yeah. A good meeting closes on time. So speaking of closing, you were going to say?
Kevin Lawrence 18:31
Well, I’ll add one more point in and as you know, the person normally leads our team meetings, it’s hard to keep a meeting, it’s you got to keep a focus on it. And we have found consistently, using timers allows you to win because you get 10 people in a group. People love to share. And if you’re not reminding people of that, it will go on, people can go quick. They can go slow, and they can even go on forever. And it’s our job to manage that and keep the meeting moving. That’s why the someone calls running the meeting, not observing the meeting. Okay, well, let’s wrap up. So the weekly meeting we could go on about this, as Brad mentioned, as a few other episodes, you can dig into, like episode 43. The top seven Beck’s best practices for weekly meetings are 20, how to make weekly meetings more effective. The key is and we’ll go through this here is that’s one or two hours, and don’t bore people to death, please start off with something positive, to bring the team into the room and get focused, you know, we have a check in with where you’re at. And good news is are typical that we use, but there’s lots of other different ones. I prefer that one. And then you know, and basically number one is making sure we’re on track with the plan for the month. are we hitting our financials and KPIs and then going in reviewing the actual priorities and where are we at? You know, and Brad has the last seven next seven and what I do and what am I gonna do? Or you could do you know Your Progress sucks. And what’s next? That’s a very quick 10 or 15 minute review of the company level goals. And, you know, Brad’s case, he likes to even go into the executive or team level goals. But I do want to grab last couple there.
Brad Giles 20:13
Yeah. And so once we’ve reviewed quarterly priorities, we move on to customer employee data. And that may be a little bit less when you don’t have the sophistication of the qualitative and the quantitative systems at the beginning. But this is best practice. If you don’t have net promoter, if you don’t have enps starts up people, people for Q, maybe start monthly, or maybe start, what have you just saying, What have you heard? What have you heard out in the marketplace? So then we move on to collective intelligence. And that’s where we either have a presentation from someone and or we collate the items in the carpark that we collect through the weekly meeting. Of course, we’ve done episode 58 on collective intelligence, you can dig deeper into that. What a good chat, Kevin, we do love the importance of the weekly meeting, because we know that’s where the real traction happens. And if you have to start somewhere, this is the spot in terms of execution that can make the biggest, biggest difference.
Kevin Lawrence 21:22
You’ve got 13 weeks to make sure you achieve your most important goals in the company. And this is the key value driver of getting those done, keeping us aligned and making sure we move ahead. All right. Well, thanks for listening. This is the Growth Whisperers podcast with Kevin and Brad. You know, we both have newsletters that we share every week in addition to other resources. So to learn more about Brad and how he can help you and get his newsletter evolution partners.com.au And for myself in our firm, Lawrence and Co again, you can get our newsletter or other resources there. We’d love to help you just go to Lawrence and co.com Hope you have a great week, and that your weekly meeting is also great.
Podcast Episode 92 - The Monthly Leadership Team Meeting
The Monthly Leadership Team meeting provides an opportunity for a leadership team to dig deeper into issues and opportunities, and is a link between the weekly meeting, and the quarterly execution planning meeting. Also the monthly meeting answers the question - Are we on track for this quarter's plan? And, what needs to be done to course correct.
In this episode, Brad and Kevin discuss why you need a Monthly Leadership Team meeting, what a monthly meeting agenda must include, and tips for a productive and successful monthly meeting.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Please note that this episode was transcribed using an AI application and may not be 100% grammatically correct – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.
Kevin Lawrence 00:13
Welcome to the Growth Whisperers podcast. This week, we're going to have a great time talking about the monthly meeting. This podcast is about building enduring, great companies, something Brad and I are very passionate about. And we talk about different things every week to help people thrive as they build their businesses. So I'm Kevin Lawrence joined, as always with Brad Giles. How are things going for you today?
Brad Giles 00:38
Excellent. We are in the throes of summer. A beautiful time in Australia the summer. So what about you, Kevin? How are you doing?
Kevin Lawrence 00:53
I'm doing awesome. We're well on our way in 2022. So word of the day, Brad, what would be the word that you have?
Brad Giles 01:23
Confident! So how confident are you going into 2022? Hopefully you've been following this series of episodes about the meeting rhythm, and hopefully you've got a coach, you've got a plan in place that gives you confidence, because it's certainly the thing that I've seen is that the more that we do this stuff with teams, the more confident they get about this year energy and their future. And what about yourself?
Kevin Lawrence 01:51
Change Agent is the word for today. You know, we all need to be change agents. But I really think about it in some of the work that we're doing in companies. And in many ways, that's what we are. And I think it's Newton's law that an object will remain in motion, and unless acted upon by an unstable force. And in many ways, we are the unstable force, that helps to change the trajectory of the company, because they're very comfortable going down the road that they're going down. And we need to kind of shift and change their perspectives. And we do that through questions and tools. And that's and being that change agent. So a confident change agent can have a massive impact on a company's performance. And ideally, we're trying to help everyone to be the change agents, not just ourselves or not just the CEOs.
So the monthly meeting, and there's many different versions of the monthly meeting. And what we're talking about probably isn't the one that you're doing, if you're doing them already. There's a very specific structure for a monthly meeting that we're going to dig into today. And the main thing is, it's either two or four hours, or in some cases a full day that this meeting would be and we'll get to that in a minute. One of the things though, that's most interesting, and we're talking about this as we're preparing, it is the one meeting rhythm that we often encourage people to do last, as in, let's get your annual and your quarterly meetings going. Let's make sure that your weekly meeting is highly, highly effective. You know, getting the dailies going for those that choose to do them. They're very powerful, though not everyone does them. But we will get all of those meetings up and running first, and then we generally would tackle the monthly.
Brad Giles 04:08
Yeah, I like to say to teams, get the weekly meeting, highly functioning, get they're working really, really well. And then what I've noticed is that teams get this gap between a weekly and a quarterly. It's like we need another meeting where we dedicate more time to it. And when you get that feeling which it could take six months or 18 months of running the weekly. When you get that feeling it's probably the right time to go into a deeper dive. If the weekly meeting is a shallow dive than the monthly is a deeper dive into the items that we're going to go through today.
Kevin Lawrence 04:50
Right. So an effective quarterly and effective weekly, generally start to build the demand or the need for a monthly to dig deeper and get a bit more sense TJ, on a more frequent basis, because what happens is you don't get to it in the weekly, and then the quarterly gets overloaded. So then the monthly meeting Bs is the place where we chew through a lot of these other, you know, tactical or strategic discussions that are really important.
Brad Giles 05:15
What's ironic is that we're talking about senior leadership teams, people who work in and on the business. But if you were in a board, perhaps, for a board member, the most important meeting is probably the monthly board meeting.
Kevin Lawrence 05:32
If they have them, and some boards don't, some boards get to the point where they can run it based on a quarterly meeting. But that monthly keeps you in touch an impulse or in have the pulse on and in touch with what's going on in the business. Cool. Well, let's jump in. So they're, you know, why does this matter? Like, what is the real value of that monthly meeting? I mean, one of the key things is, are we on track at a deep level for all of our quarterly goals, that would be the company level goals. And the department level goals is everyone on track with everything. And that's a chance to get support, get insights, and then recalibrate, to still be able to achieve what you need to by the end of the quarter.
Brad Giles 06:15
Yeah, imagine that you are 30 days in or four weeks into the quarter. And something is just really, really red. In other words, there is an item that's quite important that nothing's getting done on, well, this is the chance to really stop and recalibrate and say, well, either we're going to not do it. Or we're going to change the plan or change the jack or additional resources or something we need to figure out. How are we going to get that done in the next eight weeks, if you've done nothing in the past four weeks?
Kevin Lawrence 06:47
Yes. So it's a chance to do that recalibration and catch up because we need reminders, we forget about what's going on and get lost in the chaos of the drama or the problems of the day today. Or the monthly meeting forces you out of the day to day to look at these things and get back on track. So super important. The second thing I mentioned a little bit already, but as to review at the department level, how we're doing. And this is both for the benefit of the CEO, and the executives, it creates sale and peer pressure reviewing how we're doing. But usually people in departments are running doing their thing. And they're off doing their own. This is where everyone comes back together to give updates. There's lots of dependencies to paint between departments, or things that people need to know to stay in sync. And there's no other time when we're really going to look at what our peers are doing versus what they committed to.
Brad Giles 07:45
Yeah, so it absolutely depends on the size of the business. But I've got teams who run weekly meetings, and, sorry, monthly meetings. And for one hour at that monthly meeting, they all have a department or a team of let's say three to six people come in from the department. And they'll go through a set agenda as a part of that broader monthly. And they'll say How you going on your priorities. They'll give some updates they'll work through, they'll answer all of the questions you've got and make some hardcore decisions. Because all the decision makers are in the room and gets things to move faster. So that means that they might have let's say, between eight and nine, they'll have the sales team come in between nine and 10. They'll have the operations team come in, and then the marketing team or something like that, so many different ways to do it. But it's a deep dive. That's the important part.
Kevin Lawrence 08:41
Yeah, 100%. The next thing is zooming out and looking at customer and employee feedback, like what is really going on with our other key stakeholders, right and zooming out and say, Okay, what are the customers saying what's good? What's not good? What might we need to tweak in our plans right now? Yes, we have plans and goals. But if we're not taking good care of our customers, we might need to do something different and similar with employees, what are we hearing? What's the pulse on different things?
Brad Giles 09:10
The important thing is that we want qualitative and quantitative data. So we might have, for example, a net promoter score for customers, which is quantitative, and also a for Q for questions. We've got an episode about the four Q, what are the four questions that we've got to ask all of our customers that is systematized, which is qualitative so that we can get that kind of one on one feedback that's very different to the NPS. And then the same thing for the employees where we would say for example, the employee net promoter score, which is quantitative and then the start stop key, which we stopped doing, which we stopped doing, which we keep doing, which is the qualitative aspect. So if we've got enough of that type of data coming in regularly, that's going to help was to make better decisions as a leadership team.
Kevin Lawrence 10:02
Yeah, and just being in tune with the environment internally and externally. The next piece on a monthly meeting, and I believe this is where some of the greatest value is created, there's a lot from reviewing goals and making sure we're on track. But then it's collective intelligence and like happens in quarterlies. Although often there's not enough time in the quarterlies. To do as much of this as we need to, is that we dig into some of the projects that we're working on, or some of the things that we need to figure out, someone will come and make a presentation on what we're doing around the ERP. And then we're going to brainstorm some stuck points, or brainstorm resources or brainstorm whatever it is, we need to do to make that project successful. So it's where we need to get realigned or make some important decisions do use the brains in the room to push it forward. And again, it could be pushing it forward from making the decision, or it could be pushing it forward from a buy in, or pushing it forward from getting resources and support. But whatever it happens to be is that things that we all need to be involved in interestingly, one of my clients in India, well, they used to fly people in eight times a year for these monthly meetings from all across, you know, we're talking like planes, trains, and automobiles to, to cross India to get back to corporate to have these meetings or head office, they don't call it corporate. But for many, many years, they would bring everyone in for a full day just to bring people together, because the output of these meetings and this collective intelligence, in particular, all of it is growth of your middle managers. Because that's when they would bring these middle managers in not just the executives, the extended team was 40 people, which is quite an expense, I think it was what 8% of their employee cost. This, this, this meeting ended up adding up to, but it was an opportunity to have these added more people involved and develop and grow, because they're getting a chance to really dig into the business. And it wasn't happening in any other forum.
Brad Giles 12:03
And those people would have grown so much over a year, two years, three years. Yeah, all of that learning, it builds such a strong, such a strong environment, you know, our job as leaders is to grow the people around us so that they can grow the company.
Kevin Lawrence 12:22
Yeah, and what we refer to as DNA transfer, it's the time when you get to work with the directors and the executives and understand what's going on and see different things and work with your peers and give them lots of projects and other things. So that's, you know, the next is really, you know, the collective intelligence and those strategic discussions. And then, you know, the final piece, and then sort of Last but not least, and it's a given, although most people do a very, most people have opportunities to improve on this. And that is a very deep financial review. Yeah. And that's grinding through the income statement, the balance sheet, and the cash flow, and really line by line, what's working, what's not working? And what are we going to do to do something different going forward. And if we look at this, for a lot of organizations, people have a financial review, but the not a lot happens, there should be a noticeable amount of action items after review these and you know, and it's even going through and having a lot of questions. So this is pressure, testing the financials, asking a lot of questions, and then figure out what we have to do to perform better the next month.
Brad Giles 13:31
Because if we're not digging deeper on a monthly basis, suddenly, we're going from the weekly meeting to the quarterly meeting, which is great to start off. But as I said earlier, you're going to get to a point where you're going to need to dig in and to execute better, we've got to go deeper into each of these financials, each of the areas. And I love that you've got the who, what, when they're at the end, because that who what, when tells us who is going to do what by when. So we create that accountability within that a monthly meeting.
Kevin Lawrence 14:06
It's a pet peeve of mine Brad, because I see a lot of these monthly meetings, there's not enough action, it's a review of the financials to take actions, not just to review the financials. Not just to get informed and entertained.
Brad Giles 14:25
Very good. So good chat today about the monthly meeting. It's an important part of the framework. It's an advanced move, perhaps, let's say, but still a really important part of the rhythm that we want to encourage teams to get into. So let's start off. I'll add a quick point. We spoke here about collective intelligence. We've got an episode about collective intelligence, that's episode 58 That you may want to refer back to, to learn a little bit more about what collective intelligence is and why it matters and how you can structure collective intelligence in your agenda. And so let's, let's start off, typically two to four hours up to a day for the monthly. And it really answers the question, are we on track for this quarter's plan, the opportunity to recalibrate, to adjust to stop doing things if we need to, so that we can execute our quarterly plan, which would allow which would align with our annual strategic thinking plan. And so we next what we're doing is we're reviewing the quarterly progress, how we're going on each of the priorities that we've set, and we're reviewing the customer and employee data, Kevin to take us through the next year.
Kevin Lawrence 15:48
And then we get to the collective intelligence where we're putting all the brains in the room around something that we need to figure out whether we need to align around something, decide about something, improve something, get more resources, but debating the things and using the best brains in the company to do that. And it might be one of the strategic tools that we're working on, or one of our priorities, we don't know. And then And then last but not least, the deep financial review and notable a number of action items, reviewing the financials at a granular level, a unit level, a product level, whatever it happens to be seeing where we're winning, and where we're not, and taking action on insights that we have, so that we can perform better, or at least consistently in the following month.
Brad Giles 16:32
Awesome. Good, a good chat today. So this is part of a series going from the annual meeting the quarterly meeting, today we talked about the monthly meeting. And next week, we're talking about the weekly meeting. One of the most hotly debated points appoints within the meeting rhythm agenda, where people so often can make some slip up. So we hope you'll enjoy that one next week. And then the week after that, we're going into the daily huddle.
You can find the video version on YouTube. You can find Kevin at Lawrence and co.com and Kevin's got a great newsletter, you may want to subscribe to. Myself, Brad you can find it evolution partners.com.au. And again, I've got a newsletter that I produce weekly as well, which provides insights on a whole range of different things. And so that really takes us to the end. Hope that you've enjoyed the episode, and look forward to chatting again next week about the weekly meeting. Have a great week.
Podcast Episode 91 - The Quarterly Execution Planning meeting
The Quarterly Execution Planning meeting is one of the most important meetings because it is where a leadership team decides the priorities for the company and the priorities for each department for the following quarter.
The quarterly meeting takes the strategy from the annual meeting, and translates it into practical, executable goals for the team to focus on in the next 90 days - ensuring everyone is crystal clear on their marching orders.
In this episode, Brad and Kevin discuss why you need a Quarterly Execution Planning meeting, what a quarterly meeting agenda must include, and tips for a successful meeting.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Please note that this episode was transcribed using an AI application and may not be 100% grammatically correct – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.
Brad Giles 00:00
Welcome to the Growth Whisperers where everything we talk about is building enduring great companies - that is companies that will endure, companies that will be great. Every week, Kevin Lawrence, and I talk about this. And here he is the man himself, Kevin Lawrence. G'day, Kevin, how are you doing today?
Kevin Lawrence 01:57
I'm doing great, Brad. I'm really enjoying the series that we're doing around meetings, because we spend so much of our time, you know, helping to drive these meetings. And we also know people get driven crazy by an ineffective meeting.
Brad Giles 02:11
Indeed. And so we always like to start with a word or phrase of the day, what have you got today?
Kevin Lawrence 02:19
Challenged is the word, challenged. It's interesting that we take things for granted in where I live in Vancouver. I live between two places, Vancouver, and another place called Kelowna, and all the roads washed out in a big storm. And there's four major roads that go from Vancouver, back and forth. And I'm hearing that we might not these are highways, that these highways may not be a viable, unless it's essential use for months. I used to drive back and forth every week between these two areas. And so now I got to fly. Because I actually can't, I could drive once I could bring one vehicle through because it could be heading to my house. And they're trying to make it for all the essential goods, including, you know, fuel because one of the pipelines I think was shut down. So it's, it's wild. It's just it's, it's, you know, you drive these roads all the time, you never even contemplate them not being available. And so it's really so I would say, logistically challenged myself, I guess would be the best way to put it. It's as I was looking at my calendar for the month of January for every March. I just started going. Okay, I really got to think about this. How is this gonna work? Yeah, it was interesting. First world problems. But problems nonetheless, in my mind?
Brad Giles 03:44
Well, mine is, you know, you're only as good as your weakest part. And so I had a flat tire in a car yesterday, something that I haven't had for a very long time. And I've got a German car, and I won't name the make. But yeah, getting a flat tire. A few hours from home in the country was not fun. And it just reinforced some of the frustrating things about an exotic car or, you know, a car that's not really built for these conditions, I guess, is what I'd say. And that made me think that you're only in our offerings, you know, people see all of the parts, and you're only as good as your weakest part.
Kevin Lawrence 04:36
Right? Right. So we both have something in common Brad, if we sew these together, you know, our logistics system is only good as the weakest part of the road. And so when part of the road washes out, the roads useless. When part of the car doesn't function. It's useless. So you're and hence why airplanes and many things have backup systems, redundant systems. So if one goes down, you're still good to go. So quarterly meetings, the quarterly execution planning, meeting, a critical meeting, one that you know that we've been part of hundreds, I'm pretty safe to say if I did the math, it's 1000s of these that I've been involved in, they can be incredibly effective, they can be incredibly ineffective if you're not careful. Normally, when they're ineffective, it's because the agenda has not been well designed. And or people aren't well prepared, or the person supposed to be running the meeting isn't that effective themselves.
Brad Giles 05:38
You know, we operate on 90 days sprints. This is the second in this five part series talking about the meeting rhythm. Last week, we did the annual strategic thinking meeting, which is, you know, two to three day typical meeting. But this is about the quarterly execution planning meeting. And so whatever our strategy is, that's been determined from the annual meeting, this is where we get down to the real execution planning, this is where we get to identify what it is that is worthy of effort in the next 90 days for the company, for the departments for the individuals, so that we can give ourselves the best chance of success.
Kevin Lawrence 06:29
Yeah, it's an absolutely critical meeting and a critical, critical discipline, to take time every 90 days to reset the plan. Because the annual plan you have is a great hypothesis, things change, you learn new things, never mind, market conditions might change, or internal factors would change that might need different types of attention. So yeah, critical meeting. And you know, the key things is, it's one to two days, every 90 days, it's a serious commitment. But it's the time when you bring everyone back together, you take and are held accountable or hold yourself accountable for what you committed to last time. And then as a result of those learning and improvements that will come out of it every single time if you run the meeting, right?
Brad Giles 07:12
You know, it's not very often that I go New Age. But I've got a theory about the effectiveness of quarterly execution planning meetings, and why they're quarterly. And that is that the our body, our mind has evolved over millions, if not 10s, of 1000s of years. And every 90 days, the season changes. And so, you know, spring, summer, autumn winter. And so my theory is that at a biological level, we need to operate in these types of 90 days sprint, and that's why it's not 60 or 70 days, and why it's not 110 days. That's why because at a biological level, it feels right for us to have change after 90 days. And it feels like that's something that's achievable.
Kevin Lawrence 08:10
So the biologist and Brad says it's because the changing seasons. And you know, someone tried doing it twice a year, and it wasn't enough. So they said, well, let's do it twice more. So what works? Are they your sounds much more intelligent. The fact of the matter is that there's a point of where we just need to recalibrate, we've got some companies who do many versions monthly, you're really moving quickly, people can drop it down to monthly. The thing is, it takes time to really reflect properly. So the more frequently do it, it's it can be beneficial. It also can be challenging. So let's look at the key things that we want to do. First of all, ideally, you're off site, not in your office, again, just like with an animal, and you will you get distracted when you're in the business. So ideally, getting out of the business. Now, many people are also doing a lot of these virtually over COVID people figured out you could we run so many meetings virtually on a quarterly basis. And many companies are going to continue to keep them virtual, because it's very effective and efficient. You just don't get all the relationship building piece and the bonding that comes out. But the idea is it aside from it being a critical and a reset that the first point, though, is that it matters because it really helps us to be accountable to what we did. And then to identify what our next set of priorities are, what are our next marching orders, what are our next set of goals or priorities for the next 90 days? So we're all crystal clear and aligned on that. So that's number one. The most important output, what are we getting?
Brad Giles 09:51
Stuff happens between the annual and the first quarterly or the first and the second quarterly? That stuff means that priorities that we thought we might have 90 or 190 days ago, whenever it is, they will change. And so this answers the question, what are our priorities? Yeah.
Kevin Lawrence 10:13
The second major point is, is the, the meeting starts, it's a look back. It's a review of how we did it's an accountability session, we committed to these things, how did we actually do? And then evaluating both the financials, how we did, how we did on our goals, a review of our people, how our people were performing, and what do we need to adjust with our people? And just taking a look at these different aspects of our business? And seeing what is really working? And what we know, Jim Collins calls mining the brutal facts, what are the really good opportunities or the things that are maybe challenging and not working? Interestingly, in that review, we often have people do a talent review of their key seats or key leaders that they present, and what they're going to do to strengthen that team. We also do a bit of a culture review, we have a mini pulse survey that we do either one, two or three layers deep in an organization to see what's going on and how the other people are thinking and feeling at this time, so that we're not caught by surprise, or we're not thinking that we're leading the teams well, but really creating problems. So it's, you know, you some companies get deeper, some stay a little bit more simpler, but the key is a true reflection of how you've been performing.
Brad Giles 11:31
And so you touched on the brutal fact that we've done an episode on that episode 59. Confront the brutal facts, Jim Collins Miss method for Team hygiene. So you can refer back to that. And what that means it's such an important part, confronting the brutal facts, every single quarter.
Kevin Lawrence 11:50
Say it's an agenda point on mural digitally, or a flip chart on paper where we make a list every single meeting? So I brought a jump, I jumped in there too quickly. And you're in the middle of saying something?
Brad Giles 12:00
No, no, no, no, that's exactly what we do. You've got to have it as a part of your quarterly agenda. Yep. And so we move on to we've got the quarterly review, the previous quarters review, we move on to the core ideologies. So what are the core values? Stories? What are the core purpose stories? People aligned? What are the actions to live as we would say? So how do we get more people to understand the values and the purpose and the BHAG more deeply?
Kevin Lawrence 12:29
Yeah, and there's a piece of that, that we do when we do our cultural review that pulse survey, it gives us some other things that we actually mind the brutal facts and a few other things. But just knowing that we got to keep breathing life into this culture and these core ideologies, because if not guaranteed, they become corporate wallpaper, just blah, blah, blah, up on the walls and posters that aren't being lived and breathed and felt in the organization. And we got to keep helping it along.
Brad Giles 12:55
Mm hmm. And so then once we've covered off the core ideologies, we move to the next point that we have to consider in a quarterly execution planning meeting, to review and test the strategy. Remember that we've set the strategy at the annual, and we've evolved the strategy at the annual strategic thinking meeting. And so how are we performing in context to that, or maybe we're going to test some aspects, perhaps we're going to dig into the five forces or use another tool, perhaps we're going to evolve. If we're a bit earlier in the program, let's say, or the journey, perhaps we're going to evolve? What is our understanding of the flywheel or whatever concept or tool we're using? So there's some time that's allocated in there, to review and to test and to ideate.
Kevin Lawrence 13:47
Yeah, and then the next piece is, is to resolve big issues. We call it strategic discussions, having time when we're all together, to debate really, really important things. So one of the last meetings where I was in with this, we were debating the COVID policy one, what was the policy, but to how do we roll it out properly, being mindful of our own values and the respect that we have for people on our team. But it could be that acquisition that you want to do, or it could be a new type of customer that you want to open up and start working with, or it could be a new strategic partnership or piece of who knows. There's always debates that that core team needs to have to help us to get clear on what we need to do to continue to win could be around strategy execution, doesn't matter what time to dig in. And you know, in some one of the companies I work with, we spend of two days a day and a half just debating key strategic things so we can align and decide and move forward.
Brad Giles 14:46
Think about it this way. If you're going to reset it, we've covered off what happened last quarter, and there are some things in the business that we have to incorporate into our quarterly priorities. So we can really set our quarterly priorities until we've covered off debated, argued, decided on a few items. That's the kind of stuff that we're talking about.
Kevin Lawrence 15:12
It's critical. And it's the time when we're together, we can do it, often someone will make a presentation, my rule of thumb is 10 minutes, you got 10 minutes to present. And then we can debate it, but it's debate, get the best ideas and align and make a decision or debate, get the best ideas, and then the person in charge will take those and run with it. Number six is learning, you know, whenever we can make it work, we like to get the whole team reading a book, and whatever that book is a book relevant to how we want to or what we need to do to win this year. And then we have a discussion around it, what the learning is from it, which, you know, helps to make sure people read it and listen to it. And then talking about how we can apply this. So for example, we did a meeting last week. And we had all read, there's a simple summary book of Porter's work this that that cartoon book called What a strategy. And we sat and we discussed it. And we went through it and had a conversation about what was valuable about it. What do we think about this in our context? And then what do we need to do? Not shockingly, some insights. Now book ended up this organization now wants to do the five forces, which they haven't done yet. And and and it's got everyone thinking more about competitive strategy, versus, you know, selling in a potentially, you know, what would be called a red ocean, but the point of it is having a discussion. And then at the end, we pick the one, what are we going to read next quarter. Now, either it's a discussion, someone presents it whatever it happens to be, but it's really, really key to have time where we learn together and grow together. And if it fits the agenda, it's very powerful.
Brad Giles 16:47
Yeah, learning. Here's the thing about learning that people may not consider. Imagine if this stuff actually works. Imagine, right? Well, the revenues grow, the margins grow, the size of the team grows, the complexity grows. In that environment, we need to stay ahead of that curve. And that means everyone in the leadership team has to continually learn how to do their job better, how to become more effective as leaders, because most times, most of the people in most of the jobs have are at the highest level in a firm that they've been before most of the time. And so therefore, we're always breaking new ground in terms of things that we're learning. And so we need to curate that as a leadership team.
Kevin Lawrence 17:34
Yeah, and often we need to re learn it, we'll go back and read books again. And a lot of these companies, we need refreshers, or there's new people in a team that haven't read these things. So super powerful port. And it's a discipline just to continue to stay sharp. And although it's not enough, we need more learning than just that. But that's a good start.
Brad Giles 17:53
Yeah, and then we move on to the 90 day execution plan. And so that is the priorities, the smart priorities for the company, for the department for the individual. Now, I like to say that all through our time together a day, some companies have two days, we're looking through all of these different lenses to identify potential priorities, through even through the strategic review, even through the brutal facts, everything that we're doing, we're trying to find any potential priorities. And then toward the end of the session, we get this whole collective of ideas that we can then categorize and maybe some get thrown out, but we've got some real substance to work with, in order to set our 90 Day plans. So everybody should be walking away with a individual, smart set of goals, ideally, three to five, department and Company.
Kevin Lawrence 18:53
Yep. And the idea is, you mentioned Brad, as you go through the meeting, you're looking for the things that need to become goals, or some stuff doesn't, you know, a lot of stuff just might be a little task that someone does, or we leave it and deal with it in the future. But we got to boil down to a set of commitments that we're all going to march towards. So the quarterly meetings are outstanding. And you know, and some people say, Why do you need to do every 90 days, it's because it works. It becomes this learning and growth flywheel for the business where you evaluate, get a little bit smarter, get realigned, and then go and do it again. And it starts to get fragmented, but every 90 days, you're coming back and resetting. I just, I love that discipline. And you know, we've got a whole bunch of people on our team that do these for companies, and they have us do them for years, if not decades. Because the bigger piece of this is organizing and running these meetings is a job. It's a project. It takes a lot of prep and skill. And so a lot of people would rather outsource it to experts like us to run these meetings, forgetting even the content and perspective and expertise we have because we've helped so many companies Just the basic of having someone to run an effective meeting and make good use of your time is incredibly, incredibly valuable.
Brad Giles 20:07
Awesome. So let's move to review the quarterly execution planning meeting. So, one to two days, it matters because it answers the question, what is the priorities? What are the priorities for the business, the individual, the department, etc? And that is a really important question, because it tells us where to focus our effort. And there's no shortage of distractions out there. Sick. So the first point in the agenda is that we go through into a previous quarter review. And then next, we're talking about the core ideologies. Kevin, do you want to take us on to the next one?
Kevin Lawrence 20:48
We're reviewing test the strategy. We're almost always working on some different strategic models, and we're reviewing tests and update the pieces that we're working on to make sure that are still relevant, or updating with data we've got from testing things in the field. Then we go and debate and resolve key issues, whether it's solving a problem or getting aligned around key things that we need to do and be on the same page with, then we have time for learning so we can learn and grow and get smarter together, and whether we're learning something for the first time, or we're going back and refreshing and learning again to touch up our skills. And then finally dropping it into a 90 day execution plan where the rubber hits the road. We have a plan for the company, a plan for each of the teams, and then ideally a plan for each of the individuals. So everyone is crystal clear on their marching orders for the next 90 days.
Kevin Lawrence 21:40
So hey, I hope you've enjoyed the show. Thanks for listening. This has been the growth whisperers podcast with Brad Giles and Kevin Lawrence. You can get each of us on our newsletters and you should because we got a newsletter sharing our best insights on a weekly basis. Brads' you can find on his website, evolution. partners.com.au also more about Brad and what they do at his firm. And same for myself, Kevin, you can get it Lawrence and co.com lots of free resources. Learn about what we do and get newsletter to help you to stay sharp and continuing to build an enduring great company. Hope you have an awesome week!
Podcast Episode 90 - Annual Strategic Thinking Meeting
The Annual Strategic Thinking meeting is one of the most important meetings on the calendar. It's where a leadership team decides the strategy for the company and sets goals for the next year (and 3-years). Also, that strategy should clearly inform people in the business about the company focus - and what to say NO to throughout the year.
In this episode, Brad and Kevin discuss:
- Why you need an Annual Strategic Thinking meeting
- What an annual meeting agenda must include
- Tips for a successful annual meeting.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Please note that this episode was transcribed using an AI application and may not be 100% grammatically correct – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.
Kevin Lawrence 00:13
Welcome to the growth whispers podcast where everything we talk about is building enduring great companies, not just great companies, not just enduring companies and growing, enduring great ones, which means they're around for decades and continue to thrive, ideally, from leadership team to leadership team, maybe even generation to generation. That's what we're passionate about. I'm Kevin Lawrence. I'm here today, as always, with my co host, Brad Giles, Brad. Hello, and how are you today?
Brad Giles 00:39
I'm doing very well. Thank you, Kevin, very well. Had a very good weekend in our Southwest. And looking forward to an interesting topic today.
Kevin Lawrence 00:48
Yes, me too. Yeah, I was down in Palm Springs last week working with a company I've been working with for a decade 40 annual and quarterly meetings later. And I mean, they're just like, we're laughing as we're reviewing the results because it's just incredible how well they're doing huge percentage of a players and results that follow. It's incredible. So let's get right into it, we got a really great show. Today, we're talking about the annual strategic thinking, meeting, resetting the whole thing, which is what we were doing in Palm Springs last week, over the last we did over four days, but three days of working. So to kick it off, what's the word of the day, Brad? What's your Word of the Day?
Brad Giles 01:33
What is discipline? So I've been watching this Beatles documentary. And it's about really the last recording session of the Beatles. And not long before a few months, I think before their manager Brian Epstein had passed away, tragically. And what they were saying is that we don't, we've lost the discipline, that where we've got someone who tells us what to do, and not to do and to keep us organized. And they were self reflecting on that in the way that a coach does. In the wasting Yeah, in the way that a coach does. And through. So through that lens, I was really thinking about how they were they knew that they were struggling, because they lost that that central point of discipline that was external to the band, which, as you may know, only a matter of months later, the Beatles had split up. So discipline, what's your word?
Kevin Lawrence 02:33
Minus festive. You know, we're coming into the festive season here. And you know, for those that celebrate Christmas, or whatever the kind of faith that people have, and just, you know, spending some time with my family, just thinking about how, you know, there's different seasons where and you know, in the Christmas or festive season is one where it brings a whole bunch of joy to it, you know, people decorate their homes, they think about bringing in having special gatherings and just how that kind of puts some sparkle on life and makes things a little more exciting. More time connecting, and just how that's it's, they're great traditions that bring people together.
Brad Giles 03:14
Yeah, life would be nowhere near the same without them. That's for sure. Right? So another great tradition is the annual strategic thinking meeting. But before we do that, I want to hit you try to stitch together discipline.
Kevin Lawrence 03:29
First. Yeah, it's its festive discipline. It's like the It's the joy of discipline, Brad, you got joy, and fun and bringing people together. And then you got discipline, and it takes good discipline, to have great gatherings of people. You got to plan and get organized discipline and festive discipline. All right. So yeah, strategic plan, the annual I'm just if you didn't just fresh off one in, in Palm Springs, and, you know, it's, it's one of the most important times of the year for a company, you know, it just, you know, just as holiday gatherings are one of the most important times of year for some families. But for a company, it's everyone comes together and has time to step out of the business and zoom out from what have prospective to really, quote, get on the business. And think about it in a way before they drop back into execution mode. So it's incredibly impactful. And is, you know, and the one of the key things that we were talking about, as we're preparing for the show today, is it you know, it's, it's at least too often three days that people some people will spend four or five, but you got to spend a few days, so you're not rushed. So you have time to really contemplate and reflect.
Brad Giles 04:40
Yeah, it's it really, it really sets the basis for all of the other meetings. So what we're going to be doing over the next five episodes is a series about the meeting rhythm. So today, obviously we're talking about the strategic annual the strategic thinking meeting. Then next week, we're talking about the quarter orderly execution planning meeting. And then we're talking about the monthly leadership team meeting. And then the week after that the weekly meeting, and then the week after that the daily huddle. So really, through these five episodes, you'll get a bit of an understanding of the meeting rhythm in its whole. And then I mean, what is the meeting rhythm matter, Kevin?
Kevin Lawrence 05:24
Well, let's because it keeps us focused and aligned, it also keeps us accountable. When we get into the day job, we get caught up in everything that's going on, often in short term issues. And this meeting rhythm reconnects us to what's most important, it connects us to our major goals that marches forward to be the company we want to be, versus the daily drama that we can get lost in.
Brad Giles 05:46
Yeah. So we've done another episode, kind of connected to the annual strategic thinking make it the annual strategic thinking meeting, thank you. And that's Episode 85, how to get the most from a strategic planning framework. So you can certainly have a look at that as a reference point. But as you said, it's really a two day meeting, some companies have a three day some days, some companies have a bit more, but you need enough time to build a strategy, that you'll be confident for the next four quarters, essentially, until the next strategic meeting, that depends on the size of your company. And how dynamic the market is, I suppose that bit of best practice could be two, maybe three days agree.
Kevin Lawrence 06:38
Exactly. And ideally, with a lot of the companies that we work with, depending on how the year is going might depict the place that we have the meeting. So the company that I was just with her US based, and often we would go and have our meeting in Mexico or somewhere else for in the US, it's a nice place to get away to clients or work within India, we've done them in many different locations all around the world. They interestingly tie it in to doing tours of similar companies like there's to do a bit of learning and, and relationship building with similar types of businesses in whatever city they go to. So we go to a better locations when the business is having a better year. But no matter what it's getting off site together for those, you know, no two, three or four days. And as we roll forward, as some teams are more virtual more often this meeting becomes more important because of the bonding and alignment that happens.
Brad Giles 07:35
Yeah. So you touched on a really important point there, which is best practices to have it off site not to have it in the company meeting room. Gosh, no. But some people think that way. We've got a meeting room. Why is
Kevin Lawrence 07:48
that a horrible idea? Brad? Why is it horrible to have it in your company meeting room, especially for the annual I could argue for the quarter. But why is particular for the annual
Brad Giles 07:58
I think psychology, it tells you it's important. Number one, it tells you it's it has a different level of importance than other meetings. But number two, you're not distracted. So you can't, you can't walk out to the bathroom in a break and get accosted by someone else in the firm who's going to ask you 10 or 20 different questions that are going to take your mind off. So this is really about deep work. Get it is thinking is
Kevin Lawrence 08:28
and great way to put. And the other piece is ideally in a perfect scenario. Some of the best ones is you're staying together in the same house. So for example, the one we just did in Palm Springs, which is much like our team one that we did in Whistler in September or October, sorry. But in this house, we have we rented two houses next door because there were 10 of us and we want everyone to have their own room. But we had a massive work place. And there's also a pool and a hot tub and places to play games and all of these things. There's room for breakouts all over the place if you find the right house, but we had a chef who would come in and cook breakfast and lunch for us. We were going out for dinner, I think all the nights except for one. But it gave us an amazing foundation. But we had time together in the morning and you're eating together and you're hanging out at night, all these activities really helped to bond you, which is different than a hotel room. Because when the meeting is over, people go back and do their email, talk to their family and do all those other things. And it's not that you shouldn't talk to family. That's great. But the idea is you're together for 4870 to 96 hours, whatever it happens to be. And that's there's major spillover benefits you get from that. Absolutely. Absolutely. Somebody I know owns a retreat center that you can do that in Is that true, Brad? That's true.
Brad Giles 09:50
Yeah, we've got a retreat center here in Western Australia, called heartbeat retreat, and it's, you know, it's perfect for that kind of thing. Let's step Out of the adverts? Well, that's why we got it because we've got so many teams and we know how hard it is to get a really amazing place to go, I guess traits. And so let's go in. So we've got really seven items that you have to cover overall key important items about the annual strategic thinking meeting. So first of all, why does it matter? Why does it matter to have a annual strategic thinking meeting? It answers the question, what is our strategy? So there's no other meeting in the calendar, where we're purely dedicated to evolving, understanding and deciding our strategy? And remember that a good strategy tells us what to say no to. So then when we spin off into the 90 day quarterly execution planning meetings, we know what to say no to where we understand, because we've set that at the annual
Kevin Lawrence 11:07
Yeah, 100%. It's, and it's not complex, but you need to have the time to be able to do that. The rest of the meetings, you're very much in execution mode. This is the time when you zoom out, contemplate, think about different things. So at this meeting in Palm Springs, we're talking about, well, what do we want the business to look like at 20? In 2030, which is, you know, eight calendar years down the road for nine, nine years down the road? Have we had time to talk about that? No, we had time just to sit and really wonder what could that be like? Well, what are not be like? And again, normally the other meetings, you don't have time to think about that? Yeah, so that's, that's crazy. So our second, the second major thing is, is reviewing the previous year, a full review. And we're looking at the review of the financials, obvious, but you know, sometimes people don't put enough energy into that. And with insight of what's working, what's not working, what do we have to do differently? Reviewing of the people looking through the key people in the team? Who are the high performers? Who are the low performers, who shouldn't be in the company? And how are we going to do that? How are we going to grow develop the team? And then what are the gaps, the key people we have to hire? And then the strategy review, review of all the execution plans that we had. Yeah, and really deep, and then also taking a look at the culture, how's the culture of the business? So it's a real time to dress down the business and see what's working, what's not? How do we do it better, because aside from being accountable to what we've committed, you know, the rest of the meeting is about do it better next year, because we're resetting that next plan.
Brad Giles 12:46
Yeah, that's an important point, there is a transition. And I've actually got a slide when I get to this point, which is a large photo of a button, and it says reset. So we go through that annual performance, all of the kind of things that you've discussed, what worked, what didn't, did we achieve our priorities, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then, and we achieve our priorities for the past quarter. And then there comes a point, it's like, now we've pressed the reset button, whatever has happened, has happened. Now it's time to move forward. Let's get stuck into it. And that really takes us to the next point, which is starting at the top of the mountain and talking about how are we performing on how I Corps ideologies, and initially, obviously, our big, hairy, audacious goal? How are we working with our big hairy, audacious goal isn't performing. And so we've, we've got a, an episode on this episode 87, which is the five main B hag big, hairy, audacious goal, mistakes that you may want to reference for that. But yeah, we begin with the B hag, and the core values and the core purpose, how are they working in the company? Are they still right? Where are the errors, those types of things? Yeah,
Kevin Lawrence 14:05
and you know, and often, everyone looks at different strategic tools to help them look at their business. And we get into a bunch of these tools, and lots of the companies who work with take, especially the ones that have been with us to spend time with Jim Collins in his lab, they will also take a look and review the validity of the hedgehog and the validity of their flywheel and the health of their flywheel and what needs to happen next, I would also some of this falls into our next point, as well. But taking a look at these things that you're using to define and strengthen your company and just checking in on them, what's the health of them and what might mean need to do different?
Brad Giles 14:45
Yeah, yeah. And there is no not really any other time in the year when you might have this as an agenda item. So we then move on to a strategic analysis of the external and internal environment, again, many tools that you could use for this. But we've got to assess what's changing in the market. What, what is the technology that could impact us the societal changes, if we're not doing this at least annually, you know, there could be things that could arise that we're not going to be aware of. And we could act too late. So dedicating time to looking inside and outside the firm as an analysis.
Kevin Lawrence 15:30
And so for example, some of the tools that we might look at is you might look at a SWOT or strengths, weaknesses and trends. There's Porter's Five Forces, you know, other tools that have you be able to reflect on this in a structured way.
Brad Giles 15:43
Indeed, indeed. And then we once we understand that we can move on to the next point, which is, how will you be different? Michael Porter's got some great tools on this that, that we've covered off before. How will you be different in the market? How will you avoid commoditization? And so trying to understand, in your firm, what's worked, what hasn't, and applying some tools to the thinking that is differentiation in the market in which you play?
Kevin Lawrence 16:16
Yeah, and this is, we've done another episode on this, by the way, it's also differentiation in your whole value chain, versus just in your marketing and how you're communicating. And those are, it's the core differentiation in the value chain that makes you compete very, very competitive. And a marketing differentiation is good. It's just not as impactful and sustainable or enduring as the as the core model differentiated,
Brad Giles 16:43
shout out to our marketing friends who do a great job. But marketing is designed to only focus on the customer side of the equation, where strategy focuses on the entire value chain. And I can already imagine the blank looks on the marketing teams faces when I say that, because I've said it and had those plant looks before
Kevin Lawrence 17:03
- Yeah. And one is, it's almost differentiation through business model versus differentiation between through positioning and how you're communicating with customers. So excellent.
Brad Giles 17:17
And then finally, we work to based on that differentiated differentiation, we moved to decide what are the company goals, the top three to five priorities for the whole company and how we're going to be different in the three years. And then what are the company priorities for the one year, so then we know that the whole team is aligned around what we need to focus on. So really, we're walking backwards down that big, hairy audacious goal mountain going from the 10 to 30 year ago, to the three year we understand what happens at the three year and then the one year, and then finally, we move on to a 90 day execution plan.
Kevin Lawrence 18:02
Yeah, and before we get down there, the key thing is, is as your review these different models of your your your B hag, your core ideologies, things like your flywheel, your five forces, your differentiation, or your positioning in the market. When you review all of these things, as you're reviewing them and calibrating them, you start to get clear on what the most important things you need to do. And that's this piece that you just talked about. It's number six, right about the company goals for the three year and the one year is that if you just go pick those goals, you're going to pick them logically and linearly. But without that, when you have that context, you think about it notably differently, and generally, more strategically. Because you're seeing gaps, versus well, we just need to logically march ahead, if you don't do it. And that's why we got to spend the time on that stuff upfront. And
Brad Giles 18:55
I was speaking with a leadership team only three days ago, about why we set goals starting at the end goal and working backwards rather than us the logic as you said, which is starting today and thinking well, knowing what I know about today, this is where I want to be in 90 days. And then if I execute that this is where I want to be in one year. And then if I execute that this is where I want to be in three to five years. It's so much more valuable, starting with the end in mind and walking backwards,
Kevin Lawrence 19:28
because you get creative and you end up building bigger gaps and more tension into the thinking. And that tension makes you creative and you find ways to move faster or differently that you wouldn't in your logical March. So yes, the starting with the end in mind getting really clear, and then letting the tension drive creativity. So company goals for three years and one year really, really critical. And again, when we do a fly wheel review, one of the things we talk about is that you know, every each of your three year goals, it has to helps speed up the flywheel. And if it doesn't, you should be saying no to it 92 execution plans is fun. That's where the rubber hits the road, we have a rule of thumb that we use as we can't leave any quarterly or annual meeting without those 90 Day plans really clear.
Brad Giles 20:13
Never, never, never, never, never. Otherwise, you could forget
Kevin Lawrence 20:17
everything else. And when you're getting started, you have to have them. Because it's what you use to go and implement and learn it each time you do it. What interesting things about those 90 Day execution plans is also making sure that they're smart goals. And, you know, again, the company I was just with, we have very, very clear outcomes on every goal, we have a system and it's built into the company DNA now that you can't have a goal without a clear outcome. That's hard for people to do people who say, Yeah, we're going to improve the sales process. Okay. To what end? Well, so that it's better, we're going to get a higher closing rate. Awesome. What's your closing rate gonna be? Okay, how much business? Are you going to close? And getting down into tanto? Okay, we're gonna sign 14 contracts of at least $500,000, each with at least a 35%. Gross Margin. Okay, excellent. That's very different than improve the sales process. And you know what happened? That's a whole thing around setting these goals. That's another topic. But the point was, clear, tangible goals that produce the outcomes for the business. Now, ideally, on these 90 Day plans, there's two sets, there's one for the company, and then each executive in the room has their own mini plan for them and their team. And for the CEOs in the room. That's how you can have real clear accountabilities for your execs. And you can truly see how they're producing versus expectations, versus just what the financial statements say or how you feel. How do they get their team to rally and deliver those specifics?
Brad Giles 21:50
Yeah, so we've done an episode on this episode 71, how to use SMART goals with your team. And you can go back if you so desire. And take a look at that, and see what's the best practice around those smart goals? And why do they matter? Yep,
Kevin Lawrence 22:05
they sure do. So very good. At the end, we got a 90 day plan for the company. And for each executive in the room, if you're really advanced, those would scale all the way down the business. But that takes some time to get there. So what to remove that game, we're talking about the annual strategic thinking meeting. So we'll go through real quick one, why it matters, because it clarifies our strategy, it gets the team aligned and locked and loaded for the next year. Second one is we do the previous year review so we get the best learning and how we can do better. By the way, my favorite question is, okay, great. How would you rate your performance last year? And what are you going to do to take it up a notch this year, right, constantly improving our performance, confirm the B hag core ideologies? You might even get into the flywheel and other things as well. Number four, strategic analysis internal and external, just looking at what's going on and what's changing. Brad, you want to cover the rest there? And then we move
Brad Giles 23:01
on to the differentiators? How will you be different in the market, if you're not different, you're becoming a commodity. And then once we understand how we will be different transitioning that into the three year company priorities or goals or differentiators and then the one year, so getting real clarity, a deeper understanding, and then moving on to the 90 day execution plan. And so that's coming out of a an annual strategic thinking meeting, the team should be really aligned. And they should understand where go where we're going as a business. And then as you said, they should be taking that alignment back to all of their teams. There should be a communication piece that happens after that. All right, good chat today, Kevin. Very, very good chat. We're talking about the episode 90, the annual strategic thinking meeting. As always, we will move to close let's just mention YouTube. So we have a YouTube channel. You can sit you can watch the videos on there, obviously, or through our podcast and each of us have a newsletter as well, that you may wish to subscribe to We produce weekly content. So good chat today care. And let's look forward to having a chat again next week with everyone about the quarterly execution planning meeting. Have yourself a good week.