Discover 8 Proven Tips to Enhance the Productivity and Efficiency of Your Scaling Up Weekly Leadership Team Meetings
Do you have the nagging feeling that your Scaling Up weekly leadership team meetings aren’t as good or effective as they could be?
CEOs often put too much pressure on themselves to make sure that meetings run well. If meetings get bogged down, leave participants feeling frustrated, and/or don’t move the organization forward, it’s common to feel as if you’ve fallen short or let your team down.
Ensuring that your weekly meetings run well starts with an understanding of the unique purpose of this particular meeting and where it fits in the overall cadence of Scaling Up meetings.
What Is the Weekly Meeting’s Purpose?
Within the world of Scaling Up, four types of meetings are used to move information through the organization accurately and quickly.
The weekly meeting is a 60- to 90-minute discussion to review progress on the quarterly priorities and to tap the collective intelligence of the team in addressing one or two main topics. The weekly meeting is designed to keep everyone in the organization laser-focused on the #1 priority of the organization, as well as the big rocks supporting that mission. The weekly meeting is also the best place to discuss market intelligence gathered that week from customers, employees, and competitors.
What Makes a “Good” Weekly Meeting?
Weekly meetings should leave participants feeling clear about the organization’s priorities, as well as their departments’ priorities and how what they’re working on supports the achievement of the organization’s goals. If your weekly meetings are serving their purpose, participants will feel “unstuck” and able to move forward with confidence with their departmental priorities.
How you set up your weekly meetings is wildly important to ensuring that you achieve desired results from this investment of time. Using a consistent structure is critical, as is ensuring that the entire team is contributing.
8 Tips to Increase the Effectiveness of Weekly Meetings
- Understand the Purpose. Each Scaling Up meeting type serves a different purpose. Understanding the purpose and making sure that you’re including the correct agenda items in the weekly meeting is fundamental to success.
A common pitfall that can easily bog down a weekly meeting is discussing items that should be addressed in the daily huddle. The second common pitfall is trying to discuss big items that are better pushed to monthly meetings2 where all senior, middle, and frontline managers invest a half-day or full day addressing one or two big issues.
- Schedule Ahead. Weekly meetings, as well as other meetings used in implementing Scaling Up, should be booked for months in advance. Set a consistent day and time for your weekly meeting, and notify all key players that attendance and active participation is mandatory. Trying to schedule the weekly meeting on a week-by-week basis makes it hard to get in a rhythm and dramatically reduces the likelihood that all key team members will be available to attend.
A Scaling Up best practice is to schedule all project and functional meetings – including the weekly meeting – back-to-back on the same day of the week. This allows everyone to get in the meeting mindset and flow. It also maximizes the time that senior management has to be out in the field interacting with customers.
- Delegate to a Driver. A common complaint among CEOs is the feeling that they bear most of the responsibility for pushing the team forward. An easy way to lessen your burden is by delegating responsibility for running the weekly meeting to a team member.
The meeting organizer will be responsible for setting and ensuring that the group follows the agenda. He or she is also responsible for facilitating discussion and ensuring that all attendees are actively participating.
The best meeting facilitators are people who naturally enjoy driving for decisions, actions and results. If your team has taken the DiSC® Profile, consider people with the D style personality to take ownership of the weekly meeting. D styles are motivated by winning, competition, and success, which lends to their ability to nudge the group to make decisions. If you’re naturally wired this way, as many CEOs are, allowing someone else to facilitate can allow you to participate more in the discussions, creating more vibrant and productive meetings.
- Create a Consistent Agenda. The weekly meeting agenda should have structure to ensure that all participants know what to expect, but also enough flexibility that you have time to address big issues that will arise.
The weekly meeting agenda should include time for sharing good news; reviewing the status of Red, Green, and Super Green priorities; reviewing customer and employee feedback; and discussing one or two key topics. However, the time you spend in each section will vary, depending on the issues that need to be discussed that week.
- Good News First. Scaling Up specifies starting your weekly meeting with 5 minutes of sharing good news. Depending on your personality type, this may feel like a waste of time. If we’re trying to be efficient and productive, shouldn’t we just dive right in?
Remember, though, that there are multiple personalities within your team. Encouraging team members to share good news – both personal and professional – builds relationships, allows everyone to see that their actions and focus are producing results, and helps to get the team’s collective juices flowing. Limit this agenda item to 5 minutes and encourage concise shares, but definitely do not skip it.
- Fly High. A common way that companies get in trouble with weekly meetings is by getting bogged down in details when giving updates on quarterly priorities. Encourage your team to use the “traffic signal” approach to updates, giving each priority a Green, Yellow, or Red Light based on whether it is on schedule for completion, in danger of not being completed, or completely off track. Priorities in the Green are great, but don’t spend any time on them. Discussion time should be focused on Yellow and Red priorities and how to get them back on track.
- Participation by All. One of the core reasons you’re implementing Scaling Up is to more equally share responsibility for achieving organizational priorities. Within the context of the weekly meeting, this means that all attendees should be actively participating. Set the expectation early on that sitting back and watching others contribute is not acceptable. The team members who are invited to this meeting are invited for a reason: They have insights and expertise to share, and you value their contributions.
That said, successful implementation of Scaling Up requires extending some amount of grace to your team – and yourself. You are engaged in the process of changing your company culture, and transformation does not happen overnight. Employees need time to understand your new expectations and to raise their performance to new levels. Acknowledge and celebrate the shifts that have been made, and keep encouraging your team to reach higher.
- Accountability By – And To – All. “Accountability” typically sparks the image of supervisors holding their direct reports accountable for getting assignments done and meeting objectives. Within the world of Scaling Up, though, we use a different form of accountability: Team accountability.
The weekly meeting is an opportunity for peers to hold each other accountable. Consider it a positive form of peer pressure. Department heads are reporting to other department heads whether they are on track to achieve their particular set of priorities. It’s also an opportunity for department heads to see how they can work together to support departments that are a bit off pace. Use your weekly meeting to encourage the team to work together and hold each other accountable for getting things done.
Fine Tuning Weekly Meetings Takes Time
If you’re not confident that your weekly meetings are accomplishing their purpose, don’t despair. For most companies, the meeting cadence prescribed in Scaling Up is drastically different than what they’re used to. It will take time for the entire team to understand the purpose of each meeting.
Start by reviewing the 8 tips shared in this article, and assess how well you’ve done up until now at implementing each of these ideas. Then pick one idea to work on improving over the next month.
