Podcast Ep 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.

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 part​ners​.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.