By Sonja Allen 
Have you ever considered…
- How many meetings you have a week?
- How many of these meetings could be an email?
- How many of these meetings have few or no results?
- How many rabbit holes do your meeting conversations go down?
- How regularly do you talk about what really matters, in a focused fashion?
And more importantly have you asked if there is a way to ensure you and your team leave every meeting feeling it had value and purpose and moved you forward.
Getting the right team together to make the right decisions at the right time is hard. Often it’s made harder by the fact that we don’t naturally approach communications and decision-making in the same intentional and systematic fashion as we would other business processes.
To sustainably deliver great customer results all organisation must align their business systems and processes to deliver on the organisation’s purpose…
⇒ engage all their people into that purpose
⇒ and into continuously improving the business processes they are responsible for
In the world of Enterprise Excellence, we achieve this by deploying a Management System – a structured, interlinked set of measures, meetings, actions and decisions which allow us to run today’s business and shape tomorrows. It provides a right time, right place, right focus, right pace decision-making focus at every level of an organisation, or, as we call it at S A Partners: The Align Engage Improve System (AEI for short).
AEI brings all of the elements together to make your improvement journey successful. It aligns teams on the organisational purpose, engages everyone in delivering towards it and surfaces opportunities to improve, which is why embedding AEI into a transformation journey means rooting it in the culture and behaviours that will sustain it.
You may think “HUH?” at this point. How practical is this? The answer is simple – management systems really are at their core just a better way of organising our meetings.
To be effective Meetings need to visually focus on the things that are most important to each team. To do this we use a few basic principles:
- Make organisational goals / purpose clear and visual.
- Help your team understand their personal contribution to goals and track the actions required to achieve them.
- Show where you are winning and where you are losing.
- Help your team understand the expected behaviours.
- Create a standard approach for all meetings across the business.
- Define clear escalation & feedback pathways.
Organisations embed AEI or any management system, to align to & deliver on strategic priorities, speed up problem solving and escalation, reduce time spent in meetings, reduce fire-fighting, shape organisational culture in an intentional fashion and engage and empower the whole organisation to become part of their Enterprise Excellence journey.
After you have stabilized your meeting structure you can focus on taking a holistic view of the organization. In this phase you will create a schedule of meetings, also known as an inventory of meetings. This is where you hold information on all regular pulse meetings, attendees, frequency, purpose and how the effectiveness of the meeting is reviewed. As with all other processes – meetings should be subject to review and refinement. Redundant meetings can cease, duplicate meetings merged – by holding this information in one place the senior leadership team have complete oversight of how the various meetings contribute to the companies objectives.
If you want to find out how we can help you develop and deploy an effective tiered meeting system please do contact me..
