Strategic Discipline Blog

Last blog we discussed the importance of meetings fitting together.  Your meetings should cascade or telescope from the first meeting of the year which should be your annual planning meeting.  This should be about 2 – 3 days depending upon what you need to discuss, how complex the challenges are that the organizations faces, and when you last did a proper planning and strategy session.

Let’s make one thing clear for that meeting, strategy and planning are two different things.  The former can take much longer than the latter; however both require a disciplined approach that prevents short cuts.

If you’ve completed your annual meeting your strategy will be determined along with an outline of what your plan should be quarter by quarter.  You should know what your top priority for the year is.  You should have established specific success criteria[KPI’s] to monitor your progress.  You should have a plan in place for your first quarter with KPI’s for it as well.  Your top priority for the quarter may or may not match your priority for the year.  Many times there are preceding events and foundation that need to be laid in order to achieve our Top Priority.

Individual and Company Dashboards need to be created so that everyone is focused on their KPI’s [Key Performance Indicators].  Remember to make sure you are including leading and lagging indicators for these KPI’s to make sure you have warning signs should things not proceed as plan.  [Do they ever proceed exactly as planned?]

With all this in place, you can now see the critical nature of each of the meeting rhythms.  Each day, team members report on their daily metrics, successes, priorities and stucks.   This information cascades up and/or down throughout the organization.  This beehive like activity informs everyone how well the business is progressing toward its objectives.  Weekly teams get together to update on status, refocus and re-energize efforts toward the priorities and KPI’s.   Then it’s back to daily’s, another weekly, dailies, a weekly, still more dailies and finally a monthly where progress is reviewed, actions taken to remove obstacles, learning is provided before the team heads back to focusing on achieving their priorities.

With this meeting rhythm pattern each huddle, weekly meeting and monthly meeting has grave importance to the health of the organization.  Peer pressure requires team members to keep pace as they inexorably move toward the priorities the company has set and they each have agreed to achieve to produce the results for their position and to help the company reach the priorities it’s committed to this quarter.

The meeting discipline produces a powerful vortex that pulls the business forward.  Structure Builds Momentum, provided it’s the right structure and the objectives and priorities are attainable.