Many people in your company hate to meet. It’s not a secret. The only thing they look forward to is the free food, and if there is no food, well no excitement for the meeting. But what if your company meetings were better, different?
In a recent issue of Pallet Enterprise, we mentioned how a number of pallet companies are using the principles from Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman to build a better workplace culture. A key concept in the book is that better meetings can be a big part of the secret to reaching your company goals.
Wickman identifies six key components of a successful organization – Vision, People, Data, Issues, Process and Traction. He calls these elements the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS). For more information, visit www.eosworldwide.com.
Traction is the process of getting things done. Wickman stated in the book, “The ability to create accountability and discipline, and then execute, is the area of greatest weakness in most organizations.”
And that’s where good meetings can be like rocket fuel to your success. Wickman declared, “The fact is that well-run meetings are the moment of truth for accountability. To gain traction, you’ll probably need to meet even more than you presently do.”
Wickman recommends developing a meeting pulse with a specific agenda and structure that will prevent long, meandering meetings where little gets truly discussed or resolved. He envisions two types of meetings – a quarterly meeting where you look at your 90-day window in terms of goals and weekly meetings where you recap regular progress on objectives and discuss challenges.
Quarterly meetings should be pre-scheduled in advance and held off-site to provide freedom from regular distractions. The meeting length can vary, but many times it will take a full day. Before your leadership team attends, they should complete a Vision/Traction Organizer where everyone brings his or her issues and proposed priorities for the coming quarter. You can download the V/TO worksheet at www.eosworldwide.com/vto.
Wickman provides the following suggested outline agenda:
Quarterly Meeting Agenda
• Segue
• Review previous quarter
• Review the Vision/Traction Organizer
• Establish next quarter’s goals
• Tackle key issues
• Next steps
• Conclude
The Segue allows everyone to share their view of what has been going on over the last 90 days. Each person should share the following: best business and personal news in the last 90 days, what is working and not working in the organization and expectations for the day. This approach can help set the stage for a successful day and get everyone involved and identifying what they want to accomplish.
The Review is the part of the meeting where you review your numbers and company goals. Focus on the numbers and the rate of completion. You can’t meet all the goals, but you should strive for 80% or better. Sometimes companies shoot too high or try to take too much on at one time. That will be obvious if your achievement rate is low.
Reviewing the Vision and Traction Organizer (V/TO) helps to ensure that everyone is in sync and working on the same vision. More than just a quick run-through from a manger, allow everyone to seek clarification, voice their opinion and push back if they have a concern with any item in the V/TO. Wickman strongly advises, “If there is any confusion, you must solve the issue at that moment until everyone is in concert.” This part of the meeting is finished when you update any key concerns on your list of issues to work through pertaining to the vision.
Then you Establish the Goals for the next quarter. This starts with listing everything that must be completed this upcoming quarter. Focus on a list of three to seven goals and assign ownership to specific employees. With your goals set, Wickman suggests that you should have one to four hours left in your meeting. Now is the time to go through your Issues List to discuss roadblocks and challenges. Remove resolved issues and tackle the remaining ones by identifying the core challenge, discussing possible solutions and settling on specific solutions.
After tackling the Issues, you move to Next Steps where you discuss who is doing what and whether there are any messages to communicate to the organization.
Finally, you end with a conclusion where everyone shares three things: feedback on the meeting, whether their expectations were met or not, and their honest rating on the meeting ranging from 1 to 10. Your hope is that the standard grade is an 8 or above. Sometimes you need to conduct an Annual Planning Meeting. You can find more details about this meeting in the Traction book.
Weekly Meeting Pulse
Wickman recommends weekly meetings to be held in a conference room or space away from the production floor. Before the meeting, attendees should establish their goals, identify Issue status and complete a Scorecard. A Scorecard is a way to measure company progress on achieving overall goals. This isn’t a lagging indicator like a Profit and Loss statement that only covers what happened in the past. The Scorecard examines your current progress looking forward. Find out more online at www.eosworldwide.com.
Wickman provides the following outline for the weekly meeting,
The Level 10 Weekly Meeting Agenda
Segue — 5 minutes
Scorecard — 5 minutes
Goal review — 5 minutes
Customer/employee headlines — 5 minutes
To-do list — 5 minutes
Identify, Discuss, Solve (IDS) — 60 minutes
Conclude — 5 minutes
Wickman calls this a Level 10 meeting because you want to strive for a meeting where everyone gives it a high rating. One person must run the meeting. This person will move the team through the agenda items and keep everyone on track. The second role must manage the agenda. This person makes sure that the Agenda, Scorecard and the Goal Sheet are updated and in front of everyone at each meeting.
The meeting should start on time with everyone arriving a few minutes early. This format no longer requires you to take meeting minutes. Everyone should turn off their electronic devices, take a deep breath and transition from working in the business to working on it for 90 minutes or so.
During the Segue, people share good news about what is going right in the company. In the Scorecard, the leadership team examines the five to 15 most important numbers in the organization to make sure that everyone is on track to achieve company goals. Don’t focus on discussing problems at this phase.
Next your leadership team focuses on Reviewing Goals one a time. First the companywide goals and then individual goals. You basically just provide a rundown of either goals that are “On track” or “Off track”. Anything that won’t be completed in the quarter should be dropped to the IDS portion of the agenda for further discussion.
The Customer/Employee Headlines is where attendees share short and sweet headlines about any customer or employee news. This is a time to pat yourself or other team members on the back. This should be quick and no more than five minutes.
Then you review the To-Do List from last week’s meeting. To-dos are action items that are to be completed over the next week. By reviewing the status, you are improving accountability. Just identify if the To-Do items are done or not.
Now comes the most critical part of this weekly meeting where you Identify, Discuss and Solve any issues that have arisen. From five to 15 issues, you will delve into things that need some group discussion and brainstorming to solve. Some items may be on the list from last week if you couldn’t reach a solution. Write the issues on a white board and rank them in order. Then begin working on the top-ranked issue. You may only get through one or two issues per week. Wickman wrote, “This vital portion of the meeting should be passionate, intense, exhausting and never boring…The discussion should be open and honest with everyone sharing the vision and fighting for the greater good.” Once a solution is decided upon, then you turn that into a plan of attack that ends up on the To-Do List.
The meeting ends with a Conclusion that pulls the entire meeting together. The facilitator will frame everything and make sure no loose ends are left unresolved that had to be fixed in this meeting. The facilitator will recap the To-Do List of agenda items that need to be done this week. Second, this person will lead a quick discussion about any messages that need to be communicated to the organization based on decisions reached in this meeting.
Wickman recommends that meetings be held on the same day and time each week. He also recommends that they start and end on time.
There is a ton more in the book, Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman. You should get a copy from your preferred bookseller and look for more Gino Wickman resources at www.eosworldwide.com.
