#203: Meetings: From Knowledge of the Normal to Perpetuity – A Recipe to Meet No Danger
Dear friends
Many businesses and teams are so caught up in day-to-day delivery that they never align how they spend time and resources to their objectives, resulting in enormous wastage.
Everything is focused on what must be done; insufficient time on how it gets done and the processes by which it is done.
New strategies are developed, targets are set, but old ways of working are left unaddressed.
When the objectives, inevitably, are not delivered on time, the default response is to complain that people ‘don’t get it’ and that if they worked ‘faster and harder’ all would be well.
A more effective (and pleasant) approach is to include a focus on how people connect and work.
A well-designed, consistently implemented scaffolding of meetings makes running a business more enjoyable and effective.
It’s simple and powerful, but rarely done – after all, we’ve got work to do.
/ soul
We return to an ancient algorithm, the Tao Te Ching, to provoke our thinking.
This sixteenth verse comes to us compliments of Mike Freedman. The translation he shared reads:
“Things are fed by their roots
& they return to their roots
to grow & flower & flow
every thing must have its roots
& the tendrils working quietly underground.
This quiet feeding is the way of nature”.
An extract of DC Lau’s translation of the same verse reads:
Knowledge of the normal is discernment.
Not to know the normal is to be without basis.
To innovate without basis bodes ill.
To know the normal is to be tolerant.
Tolerance leads to impartiality,
Impartiality to kingliness,
Kingliness to heaven,
Heaven to the way,
The way to perpetuity,
And to the end of one’s days one will meet with no danger.
I contemplated both translations as I wrote this week’s letter.
Rootedness makes immediate sense to us – “to grow & flower & flow every thing must have its roots”.
And I was intrigued by Lau’s translation:
Knowledge of the normal is discernment.
Not to know the normal is to be without basis.
To innovate without basis bodes ill.
Keep both in mind as you read strategy.
//strategy
“The Meeting Rhythm: The Heartbeat of the Organization” is Chapter Eleven of Verne Harnish’s Scaling Up.
It starts, “at the heart of a team’s performance is a rhythm of well-run daily, weekly, quarterly, and annual meetings”.
Looked at in reverse, “The annual sets the strategic direction and priorities for the year and beyond. The quarterly breaks these long-term priorities into bite size priorities that the company can digest. The monthly addresses the bigger issues or opportunities that surface around the strategic direction. The weekly keeps the priorities top-of-mind and drives discussions around input from customers, employees, and competitors, which feeds into the quarterly and annual planning processes. The daily huddle tracks progress and brings out sticking points that are blocking execution of the strategic direction.”
Keep the daily meeting tight. No more than fifteen minutes. Focus on key metrics and where people are stuck.
The meeting shouldn’t engage in lengthy discussions to resolve issues; they can be tackled immediately afterwards with the relevant parties – it is rarely everyone in the huddle.
Social media has us all communicating in over-hyped, meaningless abstraction. Ensure that everyone communicates specifics – what they’re doing, with whom, by when.
It’s not “cultivating a customer-centric organisational culture”, it’s “meeting with X to discuss Y with the hope of achieving Z” (for more on honing your communication skills, check out Should You or Could You? and Jonah Berger’s Magic Words).
Construct your weekly meetings in the following way: spend the first 5 minutes connecting, sharing any personal news or highlights, the next 5 on highlights from the business week, ten minutes on business priorities for the coming month, ten minutes on feedback from customers and employees, and thirty minutes discussing the one or two core themes that align with the annual priorities.
Harnish recommends scheduling the weeklies before lunch and providing a simple meal afterwards. It provides another opportunity for the conversation to meander and deepen – “to grow & flower every thing must have its roots & the tendrils working quietly underground”.
The dailies and weeklies keep you connected to the constant flow of your business. Over time you will build even deeper discernment for what needs to happen next.
Monthly meetings are the place for strategic reflection and learning (read more in last week’s letter on Jim Collin’s Strategic Councils).
Tailor them to meet your business’s needs but ensure you cover sales performance. Discuss prior month sales numbers as well as analysing year-to-date and previous years’ trends. If you focus too narrowly, you’ll miss important patterns. Don’t only discuss the numbers, ask for anecdotes about customers’ experiences.
If you’re a founder-led business doing this for the first time, ensure your agenda includes stories about successes and failures in the business’s history. It’s a powerful mechanism to transmit culture and hard-earned knowledge.
The more your people know about what made you successful, the deeper your roots will grow.
In a corporate, your version might be about teams that have had great successes or projects that failed. If your team is not directly customer-facing, invite executives from teams you service to speak about opportunities and challenges in their environment.
In both contexts, share something for all participants to read and discuss. Ideally have two pieces, one addressing a core challenge and another addressing a trend in your sector.
With this scaffolding in place, your direct reports’ weekly one-on-ones can focus on coaching, helping them identify ways to amplify where they’ve having impact and honing skills to address challenges (not updates, remember these are now handled in the daily huddles).
Don’t limit yourself to the boardroom.
A leader I work with takes long walks with members of his executive team. Others meet for regular off-site dinners to discuss a quarterly theme.
As Steve Jobs rebuilt Apple, he had a daily lunch with Chief Design Officer, Jonny Ives. John Rockefeller did the same with the nine executives that led Standard Oil, and Gregg Popovich, celebrated coach of the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs, is renowned for his post-match team dinners.
Oh, and just because you’re the boss doesn’t mean you should run the meetings. Choose the person in your business who is most naturally disciplined and organised.
Initially, these meetings will feel repetitive but remember, “Knowledge of the normal is discernment. Not to know the normal is to be without basis”.
This meeting structure will build your discernment. Guaranteed.
///self
You might think, “I just don’t have the time”.
The simple fact of organisational life is the more engaged and effective everyone is, the more you’ll get done. Invest the time. The results will be worth it.
Another translation of verse 16 cautions “Woe to him who wilfully innovates while ignorant of the constant…” and encourages “should one act from knowledge of the constant, one’s action will lead to impartiality, impartiality to kingliness, kingliness to heaven”.
This entire letter could be distilled into one sentence, “Having a regular structure of daily, weekly, quarterly and annual meetings, ensures you’re rooted in knowledge of the constant which allows you to innovate, guaranteeing to the end of your days you will meet no danger”, but hopefully thinking through it in this way has made the point stickier.
All the best
Karl