The Dreaded Weekly Meeting
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Fixing The Weekly Meeting
The weekly meeting is often a horror show and needs to be fixed.
The weekly meeting is important because it plants the seed of accountability.
A good weekly meeting drives quick decisions and cascades important information and discussions throughout the organization.
The meeting should be an accountability meeting, not a status meeting.
The best weekly meetings are 45 to 60 minutes and have a specific agenda.
Agenda #1 Good News
The weekly meeting should start with sharing good news.
It should only take a couple of minutes and not be a lengthy discussion.
Starting with good news sets a positive tone for the meeting.
It helps to focus everyone on finding more good news and opportunities.
Agenda #2 Key Performance Indicators
Each member and function in a company should have 1-3 key performance indicators (KPIs) that measure success.
During the meeting, KPIs should be displayed on a screen and color-coded for success, failure, or danger.
Rather than having each person share all their numbers, focus on the KPIs in red or yellow and discuss how to fix them.
KPIs should not just be revenue or profit but also include metrics like MQLs and sales closing ratios.
Agenda #3 Your Rocks (90-Day Priorities )
A rock is a 90-day priority for the company owned by specific individuals on the leadership team.
There should be 2, 3, or 4 rocks for the company.
Other members of the team and functions may have individual rocks as well.
The rocks should be aligned around by everyone in the meeting.
Rocks, major milestones, and progress should be displayed on the screen, focusing on the reds and yellows for discussion.
Agenda #4 Who, What, When’s
"Who, What, Whens" is a meeting tool used to track tasks and their owners, actions, and deadlines.
It helps to have a list of these tasks, which could be in an Excel spreadsheet or other tool.
The focus should be on exceptions and discussing overdue or incomplete tasks during the meeting.
The meeting should also allocate 20-30 minutes for discussing issues.
Focusing On The Real Issues & Use A Tool to Track Your KPIs
Meetings should be 45-60 minutes and focused on good news, KPIs, rocks, who, what, when’s, and issues, by exception
If diving into more detail, only a subset of people may need to be involved
Assumptions: clear set of KPIs, aligned around 90-day priorities (rocks), tracking individual tasks, using a tool to track KPIs, rocks, who, what, when’s, and issues
The Metronome Growth Systems tool is recommended, but any tool is better than nothing
Use a tool to store and display progress, milestones, and KPIs for better discussions
Thanks for listening!
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One of these days, I'm gonna write a horror movie called The Weekly Meeting or maybe The Dreaded Weekly Meeting. Weekly meetings suck. Let's face it, some of you dread your weekly meeting. Some of you probably got rid of your weekly meetings because they added no value. It's crazy. Let's talk about why they don't add value.
You know, for most weekly meetings. It's the CEO facilitating the meeting and going around the room. So what do you have going on this week? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And okay, what do you have going on? Wa, wa, wa, wa. And the people at the end of the table are looking at their watch and saying, I got real work to do.
I don't have time for this garbage. I have real work to do. Weekly meetings are where accountability goes to die. There's no agenda or a bad agenda. You know, the objective of the meeting is to share information, which is a horrible objective for a meeting. There's no action, there's no drama, there's no debate cause there's little time for debate after everybody gets finished going blah, blah, blah.
Talking about what they're doing. And by the way, have you ever noticed that the people that have accomplished the least talk the most because they wanna make it sound like they've accomplished more. So my job in this episode is not to tell you to cancel your weekly meeting. It's to help you fix the weekly meeting because it, it is a horror show right now and it should be a wonderful drama that you wanna come to again and again. So I wanna help you fix it, because if the weekly meeting is done right, it's an incredibly important meeting.
And in fact, for most meetings, people say, oh, we have too many meetings. You don't have too many meetings, you have too many bad meetings and your weekly meeting is probably the worst. The reason why that weekly meeting is so important is because the weekly meeting I found, the weekly meeting is where you plant that seed of accountability.
It's where accountability either lives or dies. The right weekly meeting drives decisions, quick decisions, not decisions that get made in a quarterly meeting or a monthly meeting, but quick decisions that need to happen to pivot your actions or pivot your plan and the right weekly meeting at a leadership team level starts the cascade down of important information, important discussions, important debates throughout the rest of the organization.
So let's talk about what it takes to do the weekly meeting right. To have what I call a weekly accountability meeting. It's not a weekly status meeting. Part of the problem is the damn word status. A weekly status meeting is where everybody goes around the room and talks about what they're doing. I don't care.
I have real work to do. It's a weekly accountability meeting, the best meetings and with the agenda I'm gonna lay out for you, I believe the best weekly meetings are 45 to 60 minutes. Some can get it done in 30 minutes. That's kind of quick, but some can get it done. I think it's more like 45 to 60 minutes and it's got a very specific agenda and I'm gonna lay out my best practice agenda, which of course you could modify for your own use.
But I think the weekly meeting starts out with good news. I think every significant meeting starts out with good news and that's not fluff at the beginning of the meeting and that's not 30 minutes of discussing good news. It's a quick couple of minutes on what's going right. Everybody going around sharing a piece of good news, you get more of what you focus on.
If I know that going into the weekly meeting I'm gonna have to share good news, I'm gonna think about what good news I have and it not only starts the meeting off on a positive note, which is pretty important but what it really does is it gets everybody focused on good news and opportunity and finding more good news and opportunity.
So first is good news on the agenda. Second is key performance indicators. If you think about for each member, for the company, as well as each member of that team around the table. Everybody should have one, two, or three key performance indicators that are the best measures of success for that function and for the company.
And this isn't a time in the agenda where everybody just goes around and lays out, here are the numbers. That's not very helpful especially if you've got 25, 30, 35 numbers. Just looks like a bunch of numbers. It's not helpful. It doesn't drive discussion, it doesn't drive action, it doesn't drive improvement, doesn't drive accountability.
But if you've got those numbers up on a screen and those numbers based on goals are color coded, green for success, red for failure, yellow if it's kind of in the middle, in danger of failure, then what you can do is instead of going around the room and asking everybody to share all of their numbers is look at what's in the red, look at what's in the yellow, and say what do we need to do to fix those?
And of course things like revenue and gross margin, you know net profit, those are things that are our key performance indicators. But what about MQLs Market Qualified Leads, closing ratios on sales. You know, every function should have one, two, or three key performance indicators that are up on the screen.
Red, yellow, green. Ooh, that rhymes, up on the screen, red, yellow, green. That sounds good. So first, good news, then KPIs. KPIs by exception only look at the reds and the yellows. Don't talk about greens unless you have to. Next is your rocks. What's a rock? A rock is a 90-day priority. There should be 2, 3, 4 rocks for the company that specific individuals on the leadership own. There may be some other individual rocks that are important to other members of the team and other functions as well, but you have a small number of 90-day priorities that you're all aligned around. Again, you don't want to go around the room and say, how are you doing on your rock?
How are you doing on your rock? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What you wanna do is be prepared beforehand like the KPIs and have up on the screen the rocks, the major milestones, and whether we're red, yellow, green. And again, let's talk about the reds and the yellows and only talk about the ones that are successful if we need to.
So number one, good news. Number two, KPIs. Number three, rocks. Number four is something we call who, what, whens. Who, what, whens are in meetings. There are a number of times where something comes up. This could happen. This could have happened in last week's weekly meeting. Oh, yeah we ought to get that done. Who, what, when is simply who's doing it?
What are they doing, when are they getting it done by. You know Sanjeev is gonna create the, you know, is gonna get out our net promoter score survey by next Tuesday. Well, you should have a list of those things. Could be an Excel spreadsheet, could be some other tool. I'll recommend a tool in a little bit that you may use for all of this.
But again you wanna focus by exception. You don't wanna go through every who, what, when you've got out there, you may have 50 of them. But are there, who, what, whens which are due or overdue that have not been checked off as complete? Who owns them? What's holding you back? Let's talk about that. So good news, KPIs, rocks, and again, only by exception, what's red?
What's yellow? What could we do to help you get back on track? And then that ought to take you 20 or 30 minutes to go through that and go through it quickly. If you are prepared before 20 or 30 minutes then you've got the last 20 or 30 minutes in the meeting which you could save for issues. What do you have on your issues list?
Are there folks that are really struggling with a KPI or a rock and you wanna take that time to dive into more detail? And by the way, if diving into more detail on a couple rocks and a couple of KPIs or an issue or two over the last 30 minutes that may not need everybody in the meeting. Maybe two people can go off and go do what they need to do.
And the rest of you, a subset of you can focus on what's left. So pretty simple agenda, 45 to 60 minutes. Good news, KPIs, rocks, who, what, whens, issues, all that stuff, by exception. Now, to make that meeting work really well, there are some assumptions I'm making which may or may not be true for you. One assumption is you have defined for the company and for each function on the leadership team what the important KPIs are.
Now, I'll have a whole other episode at some point where we'll dive into KPIs but I'm making the assumption that you have a clear set of key performance indicators and an understanding of what's the measure of success versus the measure of failure so that you can come up with that red, yellow, green.
I'm also assuming you've aligned around a small number of 90-day priorities, which I call rocks. I'm assuming that somehow you are also tracking the individual tasks that people committed to those who, what, whens. And I'm assuming you've got some type of tool. Could be Microsoft Teams, it could be a spreadsheet, or some type of tool to track your KPIs, your rocks, your who, what, whens, your issues.
There's a tool I use with a lot of my clients called Metronome Growth Systems. That does a great job of all of that. You don't need to use that tool but it is important to have a tool because if you have nothing in front of you when you're having these discussions, you have things like people say, oh, I'm on target with my rock.
Well, how do we know we're on target? What were the milestones again? How did you measure the finish line? What were your KPIs again? You need some tool to store that stuff. Display that stuff so you could have great conversations. So that's it. Fix your weekly meeting. You will thank me for it.