Podcast Ep 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.

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 part​ners​.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.