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One of the keys to successfully leading teams of people is to run effective meetings.  On the surface, this seems pretty straight-forward.  Ensuring you have an agenda, take good meeting notes, and sending action items out afterword aren’t rocket science.   Relatively trivial, even though consistency is key and rarely is delivered.  However, when you are dealing with those recurring tactical meetings, especially ones that occur multiple times per week, the old model falls down.

To begin with, there really isn’t a simple strategy to produce detailed agendas any longer.   Many topics, the critical ones that need to be discussed ASAP, sometimes come up just hours before the meeting.  Furthermore, the priority of the litany of things that are on the list changes at a rapid pace.  Sending anything in or prepping for those discussions can be fruitless at best, and counter-productive at worst.

Enter the “Weekly Tactical” meeting format:
Some of the concepts in this format were adapted from the book, “Death by Meeting” by Patrick Lencioni, but others were evolved on the spot as the need arose.

The basic premise of the Weekly Tactical meeting is to get a group of leaders together to make decisions.  We don’t want to go to meetings to “talk” about decisions, we want to MAKE them.  (After all, that’s one of our core job functions)  So many organizations are plagued by the notion that meetings are simply to “discuss”, not to “do”.  This simple shift alone will increase the effectiveness of most meetings.  The word Tactical, for our team, implies that the scope of topics should cover 1 week from the date of the meeting.  We have 2 Tactical meetings per week that are 1 hour each.

Detailed Overview:
The following photos show the simplicity of the process.  I have a large whiteboard in my office that is refreshed each time we have this meeting.  It has the template written on it and is ready when the team comes in.  The image at the right shows what the layout looks like.  I tend to facilitate the sessions, but now anyone can do it as the process is simple and well understood.

Next let’s break down each section with details.

Lightning Round:

Decencies
We have recently added a kick-off titled “Decencies”.  This is probably the one I’m most excited about, and most proud of.  After re-reading Tom Peters book, “The Little Big Things” last week, I was reminded of the need to refocus our efforts on our people.  I’m leading a group of manages and architects and we tend to get mired in the day to day.  The complexity and pressure for those leaders is immense and it’s easy to get stuck focusing on “work stuff” and neglecting the “people stuff”.  Tom reminded me a second time “it’s all about the people”.  Hence, the “Decencies” kickoff was born.

Essentially we will create actions to recognize the wonderful and talented staff we have and the things they do every day to make all of us successful.  We will also think about ways to remember the Power of Pleasant, how we can connect emotionally with our customers, and hopefully keep some “damned perspective” when the tension escalates.

Topics
We then go to each person and ask for their topics.  If you have an issue or topic that you need help delivering, or you need a team decision, then it’s a good topic for our meeting.  They each have 1 minute (yes, 1 minute) to get through their entire list, along with associated explanations if needed.  We then move to the next person, in order, until we have a list of topics.  We then get started at the top of the list.

Note: we used to prioritize the list, but as of late, we have blown through very large lists so rapidly that we haven’t needed to prioritize.  If we start leaving important stuff undone, we will go back to prioritizing.

Actions and Decisions:

We then take each topic one at a time and attempt to give each topic its due attention.  We are all aware of the need to get to an Action or Decision so we tend not to lollygag.  We will discuss for a while and someone will say, “Do you need us to help choose for you?” or “Is there a next action for this that we can assign to one of us?”  More often than not, the topic simply needed a quick decision and some collaborators to ensure there wasn’t something being missed.  Other times, the issue is a bit more complex and the initiator needed help deciding on the next steps to take.

As we move through the list, the grid in the image to the right begins to unfold.  We assign tasks with associated details, 1 per line until we’re done.  Normally a “decision” is indicated with a task to communicate the decision so we ensure we are communicating those decisions effectively.

Parking Lot:

As a group, we occaisionally bump into a topic that has no simple solution or the right parties aren’t present to discuss.  They also span many teams and possibly a large time horizon.  These issues we deem “strategic” and get placed in the parking lot with associated detail.  We have a few venues that these strategic topics can end up in so we attempt to classify them on the spot

Note: this classification exercise is new.  I will update you on how its going.

The three Strategic Meetings are a “TRI-Weekly” meeting that we prepare for in advance.  It includes both leadership teams in my organization (Development Managers and Enterprise Architecture) as well as any special guests needed to (once again) make decisions on the topic at hand in the meeting.  The second is a “Development Manager” Strategic meeting and the third is ”Architecture” strategic meeting….all similar formats.  I will try and describe these formats in a subsequent post.

Well, there you have it.  This evolved format has helped our team and organization communicate better, make timely decisions, and get aftet the topics we know are critical for success.  With the addition of our Decencies section, it will also help us double down our efforts to remain focused on whats important, our people and their well-being!

Today I was invited to go to a seminar and talk about a new book, “The Superperforming CEO”. The books author, Dave Guerra, found me through a local organization I help coordinate – Milwaukee Agile. When I spoke to Dave prior to the seminar, he mentioned that he was very interested to get more plugged into the Agile community as the concepts that Agile proposes are very similar to that of his book, and life’s study in management and leadership.

The seminar was very interesting and as the talk went on, I found that he was indeed singing out of the same hymnal that agilists are regarding leadership and management.  Dave also explores the duality of problems and opportunities that business people encounter.  Here are some of the critical takeaways I received from Dave’s talk (and book) that support agile tenets:

• Super performing leaders share common traits that are pervasive – part of their fabric.  They have transformed from managers to Servant Leaders.  This models the approach used by scrummasters and agile managers (remove impediments and cultivate an environment to innovate and get the job done)
• Great leaders understand that getting process well defined without a great culture leads to unsatisfied workers, stifled innovation and broad under performance. They also understand that having a great culture without process control leads to terrible mismanagement and woeful under performance.  Similar to agile techniques, these systems need to exist in balance and are ever-evolving.  (Manage your processes and Lead your people)
• Dave spoke of a principle he calls “tacking” similar to that of sailing.  Tacking too far in one direction can throw a system drastically off course.  Minor, incremental (or evolutionary) shifts in direction yield the best results, and will serve to keep your ship upright as a side effect!  Agile often manages this through short iterations, and constant feedback through retrospectives to make micro-changes to the process.
• Superperformers are those that consistently perform over time.  This is similar to the concept of sustainable pace and continuous improvement in the agile paradigm.
• Superperformers tranform “flow” and consistently look for ways to optimize.  Kanban and Lean help in this regard by managing flow of work into the system and eliminating waste.
• The foundation for Superperformers is “passion”.  The passionate CEO will liberate the the teams to become superperformers individually by giving them the tools, encouragements, and environment they need to thrive.  This concept is similar to Scrum and self-directed, highly motivated teams.

Over all, Dave did a very good job of highlighting the key principles of the Superperformer and how to begin to achieve or unleash the super performers in our own organizations.  The book seems to have some very good detail and touches on a much broader, more tangible set of principles and some steps to take to begin to explore this on your own.  I will try and read the text this weekend and update the post.  On a personal aside, one of the things that struck me about Dave personally was his authenticity and his willingness to “want to help”.  I think he does see the value in the concepts of servant leadership, and is putting them to use in his own career as he tries to spread the word of his life’s study.