Weekly Tactical Meetings

So as you start running your weekly tactical meetings, one thing I want to make sure you do is give yourself some patience, give yourself the grace of some time to get these dialed in. It takes practice to get used to the format, but you'll find that the more you practice these, the more you really work on making them great, the better and better these meetings will be to the point that they'll become really, really almost invaluable to you and your team. So a couple of things I want to walk through in the weekly tactical meeting, and this is right out of the field Guide, is first of all, make sure that you agree with and understand the objectives of the meeting. I don't think you should ever attend a meeting that doesn't have clear objectives and a clear agenda to achieve those objectives. So we lay out the objectives for this meeting as staying connected as a team, keeping the numbers and priorities on track, and resolving the key issues. So if the agenda that we recommend doesn't meet the objectives for you the way that you would like it to, but you agree with those objectives, by all means, edit this, modify it, make it work for you, and reach out to your guide for help anywhere that you feel like you need it. But based on that, we have found that as a starting point, this is an ideal agenda to start with and then make modifications as you need to. So the way the agenda flows. Just a couple of things that you may not remember from your day in basecamp that I want to make sure you think about is in the. In the check in at the beginning of the meeting. One of the reasons I like to ask the second question that's in the list of questions in the field Guide, which is around frustrations from the prior week that need to be resolved. Is that often what happens in our businesses and in our organizations is that we have a frustration. We're putting out fires throughout the week, and as long as we get the fire out, we're off to the next fire. We never actually spend time going back to understand why the fire started in the first place. So when we're checking into the meeting, if part of that check in can be around coming to the meeting with at least one thing from the prior week that was a frustration that you feel like we need to unpack and resolve, those are great ways to get things on your issues list that may not be making it to the issues list. And what that does is it allows the team to prioritize, doing a postmortem to figure out not just that we got the fire put out. But why did the fire start in the first place? Do we have a process or do we have a system that should have prevented that? And if so, why wasn't it executed? Why didn't somebody follow the process or the system? And is it a training issue, is it a people issue? And we can go address that. But what sometimes you'll find is that we actually don't have a defined process in place that would have prevented that from happening. Whatever started the fire. And the real solution is we need to go back and build out a process for that, communicate it, train people on it. And the more you'll do that, the more you'll start to eliminate issues and frustrations. You'll have fewer fires in the business. Because what's happening is you're going back to the underlying root cause that's, that's causing the fire to start and you're dealing with it there. So the more that happens, the fewer issues you have and the easier it is on you and the organization. Second is the weekly action item review. So remember, once you get into the flow of these meetings, as you resolve issues, you're creating action items, things that people need to get done in the next one to two weeks. So this is an opportunity at the start of the meeting to make sure people are getting things done that they've committed to get done to resolve our issues. From there, we just move right into the scorecards, the scoreboard reviews, and all of these are just check in sections. So you really don't want to spend time getting off track talking about issues. If there are issues that come out of these initial first steps, you just want to move them to the issues list so you can prioritize them there. And the reason for that is when we get into, for example, the scoreboard, there might be something on the scoreboard that's off track. And if we start talking about it right away, we could go down a rabbit hole. We could spend 15 or 20 minutes talking about it, which will cannibalize time at the end of the meeting for actually prioritizing and addressing issues. That issue that we spent time on early in the meeting in hindsight, may not have been the most important thing to talk about, but we've now run out of time in our agenda and people are on to other meetings and other responsibilities without actually tackling the most important thing. So really, these first five sections in the meeting, do your best to stay on track. Keep those to just updates and anything that's off track or anything that needs to be addressed as an issue continue gets moved to the issues list before you start talking about it. So we do our score core, our scorecard or scoreboard review, making sure we're really winning the week. And if you have numbers that continually are falling off track, you've got to talk about those as issues. The issue could be that we have the wrong goal, and it could be as simple as that. We need to readdress the goal and make some adjustments. It could be that we're not putting it on the issues list and addressing it because it's actually not that important to everyone. And so maybe we should just take it off the scorecard altogether, or we're just avoiding talking about something that we need to talk about. So really think about how to continuously improve your scorecard during the course of your meetings. The Fast Rock review so this is an area where I want to be intentional with how we talk about this. So as we go through our rocks or projects, we, whatever you choose to call them, what I encourage is that each person who owns one, as they go through it, state what the project is or what the rock is, however you've titled it in the software and let the team know if you feel like it's on track or off track. But before you go on to the next rock, let the team know, just very briefly, what you did over the prior week to keep moving that project forward and what your intention is in the coming week to continue moving it forward. There may be periods of time where there was nothing to do for a particular week, and that's okay. But if I'm on the team and I continue coming to the meetings and not articulating what I've been doing to keep the rock on track, one of my teammates should call that out and we should look at that as an issue, because I may very well be falling behind and just not admitting to that, maybe not even being aware of it myself, because I think I have so much time left in the quarter. So that's a good way to just get a little bit more transparency into the rocks and make sure that people are keeping their projects moving forward. The headlines and updates section is really intended for you to cover anything that the team needs to know about so we stay connected and we're on the same page. But wasn't important enough for me to interrupt people offline in between these meetings. So use that however you need to for updates of projects that are going on, any headlines that you want to share, things that maybe have come up with customers or clients or things that are going on inside the organization, it's just a good chance to keep everybody connected. Then when we move into the issues resolution, the way I like to approach this is get the issues list up in front of everyone and just ask the team, if we could only get through one issue today, what's the single most impactful issue that we have to solve first, let the team decide what that's going to be. I wouldn't waste much time here. If you feel like there's something on the list you really want to get through, be selfish, call out that number or call out that issue, and let's get that to the top of the list. And so as we go through, I want you to pay attention to the questions that are in blue and bold. I think if you set the issue up properly, you'll find that you solve issues much quicker. And I like to say that an issue well stated is an issue nearly solved. And so the first question is, whose issue is it? You could also say, who wants to tee it up for the team? So somebody put it on the issues list. Somebody has a frustration or an issue around what we're going to talk about. So once we know who's going to tee it up for the team, I then ask them, who are you talking to? And that's typically based on who owns the decision? So some people like to ask who owns the decision. Other people ask, who are you talking to? But. But based on your accountability chart, ultimately, if we have single point accountability, somebody has to make a decision. Sometimes there's an issue where you just need to brainstorm something that you're stuck on or you need help with some ideas. Let the team know. It's a brainstorming thing and you're really talking to everyone. But most of the issues you're going to find you're talking to one specific person and it's based on the accountability chart and who owns the decision. Before you jump into talking about the issue at that point, the last question that I think is important to answer is for the person who's setting up the issue, what is the ideal outcome you want to get to if we're going to give this time today, the time is very valuable that you're spending on these issues and to get the person with the issue to clearly articulate the outcome that they want to get to by giving it some time. That clarification often propels you well down the path of getting to a resolution on the issue. So once that's all clear, check in with the team, make sure everybody agrees and is aligned. And then we go right to the person that owns the decision or that we're talking to and ask them, do you have any clarifying questions? Do you know what they're asking for? And oftentimes they already know what the solution is at this point and they'll recommend, here's what I'd like to do. If the two people agree that's the right solution, we memorialize that as an action item and move on. If you if it requires more debating and discussing, then we spend time debating and discussing and unpacking it. One side note is if the team has a bad habit of going down rabbit holes and getting into circular conversations and wasting a lot of time talking through these issues, simply get a clock or a timer, there's lots of apps you can use on a phone. And ask the team before you start unpacking the issue, how much time do we want to give this? Maybe we're going to give it 10 minutes. Set a 10 minute timer and try to hold yourselves accountable to work through the issue within that amount of time. If that ends up not being enough time, obviously you can extend that. But it starts to create a discipline and a mindset that we're going to stay more focused in our conversations. At the end of the issue when we know what's got to happen, we know what's got to be done by a certain point in time and who has to do it before we go on to the next issue, we this is where I like to capture any cascading messages and set any action items relative to that issue. So we used to wait and capture what we call cascading messages at the end of the meetings. The problem was if you got through seven or eight issues, you've likely forgotten all of the cascading messages from the first few issues. So if at the end of every issue you stop and you just ask the team, is there anybody not in the room that needs to be notified or informed of what we just decided or what we're going to do, we need to capture that as an action item. Who's going to tell them? When do you need to tell them? And just capture that on your action items list so you can come back and make sure it's done after the fact. Then go back to your issues list. What's the next most critical issue that we need to get through today? If we're going to get to one more, prioritize that one, go through the same process and just keep doing that for the hour that you have to tackle issues if that's how much time you're, you're putting in your agenda, at the end of that hour, we move on. If you get done with issues early, you're able to adjourn the meeting early, and that's totally fine. So that's how you work through the issues resolution section. And then finally the conclusion. Please don't skip the rating part of the meeting. Some people use a 1 to 10 scale. We like to use a 1 to 5 scale, and we like to have a definition for each of those five ratings. I will often encourage people to, to pull up the list that has what the definitions of each of the ratings are. But at the end of the meeting, you're just rating the meeting. You're not rating the facilitator, you're not rating yourself individually, you're rating the team. And what you're rating on is, on this one to five scale, how valuable was our time spent over this last. If it's an hour and a half, this last hour and a half. And so using that rating scale, and if you don't have a copy, ask your guide to send you one. Anything that's less than a five on a scale of one to five, the person who gives the rating has to share what would have made it better as part of the context. So if I rate the meeting a three or a four, I have to tell the facilitator or whoever was running the meeting or maybe tell the team. It would have been a five had we done this, or this would have had to happen for this to be a five for me. The person running that meeting can take that feedback and use it to help make modifications and adjustments as we go forward to make the meetings better. One thing that some companies will run into. I recently had this happen with a company that does real estate development. The executive team operates in many ways more like a holding company that has multiple business operating units inside of that holding company. And at the level that they were meeting, this agenda was not working well for them at all. Their meetings were. They were rating their meetings twos out of fives. So what we worked on is how to have a better meeting at their level. And what evolved from that is that the individual business units felt like this weekly tactical agenda was ideal for them because they were much more operational. But at the true executive team level, because it was more of a holding company structure, they changed the format so that they had lengthy updates from each of the departments within the organization or each of the business units, I think they gave each of them maybe 10 minutes. They had three different units so that was a 30 minute beginning to the meeting. It was just updates. We're not going to talk about issues but if there are issues we'll pull them out get them on an issues list. Then they had another I think 45 minutes for going into that issues list and prioritizing and tackling issues. They also decided to run this every other week instead of every week because there just wasn't enough happening over the course of one week at that high level to justify the weekly meetings. So make these your own. Get really clear on the objectives behind the meeting and then work with and adjust the agenda as necessary to make sure you're getting great value. You're having outstanding meetings tackling the issues you need to tackle making sure priorities and numbers are on track. If there are other objectives you want to make sure you cover get those documented, get that into the meeting structure and make sure your agenda fulfills that.