Executive Team Meetings: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
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Have you ever attended an internal team or departmental meeting that was a waste of time? It is a rhetorical question, as anyone who has worked in a company, no matter how big or small has experienced this reality.
Now take that experience, and apply it to your company’s executive leadership meeting. This meeting brings together the executives responsible for creating the business strategy, developing the budget, building out the organization and delivering the efficient revenue growth leading to the company value and return on investment (ROI) investors require.
Let’s think about the ROI) of an executive team meeting using the below executive team composition example:
Number of Executives: 8 (CEO, CFO, Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, R&D, Product, HR)
Average Total Compensation: $300,000
Number of Executive Meetings per Year: 50
Length of Meeting: 1 hour
Preparation Time: 1 hour per executive
Executive Meeting Cost Annually = 8 people x $150/hr x 50 weeks x 2 hours = $120,000
$120,000 - that’s a big investment to waste on ineffective meetings that take time away from high value activities that increase product velocity, generate pipeline, grow revenue, satisfy a customer and/or keep investors happy. On this basis alone, you can see the value of ensuring executive meetings are productive - but just imagine the impact on your company if these meetings resulted in decisions that actually accelerated revenue growth, increased customer retention rates and/or identified a new product idea that would take the competition by surprise?
Executive Meetings: The Good - The Bad - The Ugly
Good Executive Meetings - 3 Components:
1️⃣ Published Agenda
Each week an agenda is published at least two business days (not on Sunday evening as so often happens) prior to the meeting that includes the agenda topics regularly covered in the executive team meeting and any high priority topics that have recently developed.
Having a proven meeting structure that provides a consistent rhythm setting the tone for collaborative, yet candid discussions on the highest priority issues, topics and activities with a bias to decisions, action and no BS is table stakes for productive, and efficient meetings.
2️⃣ Shared Measurable Objective (Metric) of the week
A best practice that I have seen work successfully is having an executive of the week facilitate a review on a measurable objective (metric) that is directly correlated to a shared company goal or performance metric that is well understood, communicated and most likely presented quarterly to the board. It’s best practice to have the executive leading the metrics discussion be a partial, if not the primary owner of the “metric of the week”, to increase the likelihood of ownership and a bias to action on improving the specific metric.
The discussion could leverage a framework such as SCORE: Status, Current Trends, Opportunities, Recommendations and Execution Plan where the executive:
👉 Provides an update on the current STATUS of the metric (Example: Pipeline)
👉 Highlights the CURRENT TREND of the metrics (5 quarter trend and next quarter forecast)
👉 Identify potential OPPORTUNITIES for improving the metric’s performance
👉 Determine which IDEAS should be converted into action plans
👉 Executive who owns the topic leads and reports on execution of the action plan & results
3️⃣ Notes, Decisions, Action Items and Responsibilities
One of the most common flaws of any meeting, especially executive meetings is not capturing the notes including the decisions made, action items created and responsibilities.
One approach is to have the CEOs executive assistant take the lead in capturing the notes. Another option is to identify an executive each week, who is not leading the metric discussion, to take the lead on capturing and publishing the notes, especially the decisions, action items and responsibilities. The common use of conferencing software for executive team meetings which have recording capabilities, coupled with transcription tools, enables ~ 80% of the above to be automated - but BEWARE of who has access to the recording for potential distribution beyond the executive team.
Another best practice is not to cover too many items in a single meeting or allow discussions to wander far beyond the topic at hand - you know the non sequitur direction conversations can take that reduces the focus on the primary “topic(s)” and results in not making decisions, creating action plan and/or assigning responsibilities to convert the decision into outcomes.
Bad Executive Meetings - 3 Leading Indicators:
1️⃣ No agenda or structure
It goes without saying that if having a well defined and documented agenda prior to the meeting is a top meeting component for positive results, that not having an agenda will most likely result in a less productive investment of time.
Some will suggest that a lack of structure will make for a more creative, free flowing environment that encourages everyone to bring up a topic, or share ideas that could benefit everyone. I agree that having an environment that encourages participation and creativity is important, however that can be accomplished by having any member of the executive team suggest a topic to the CEO before the meeting which is added to the published agenda. Another option is to have a standing 15 minute period at the END of each weekly meeting for free form discussions. If a topic during the free form session rises to a level of high priority, it can become the “topic of the week” for a following week’s executive team meeting.
2️⃣ No measurable goals (metrics)
Two of my favorite quotes are: 1) “You can’t manage what you can’t measure” by Peter Drucker and: 2) “If something cannot be measured it cannot be improved” by W. Edwards Deming
Let’s face reality, some executives are more persuasive, or willing to expend more energy on promoting their point of view regardless of having data supporting their opinion. That is one reason why having company level goals that are owned by every member of the executive team, and supported by departmental goals that are causal in nature to the company level goals is so important. I highlighted the value of having a SaaS Performance Metrics Framework in edition #7 of the SaaS Barometer Newsletter.
Not having documented, well understood and consistently communicated measurable goals and their performance trends typically creates an issue. Allowing executive team meetings to spend time on low priority, non agreed upon goals and/or non correlated topics to the prioritized company goals result in lost time and lost opportunity to focus on the “metrics that matter”.
3️⃣ No assigned action items and follow-up
One of the most COMMON attributes of bad meetings. Far too often a topic is discussed, and then weeks or months later it comes up again and the “MEMORY” of the discussion and decisions are foggy at best. Moreover and unfortunately, they are often re-imagined by the person who is most passionate about it - and spun or packaged according to their perspective.
If a topic is worthy of more than a few minutes at an executive team meeting, it should be worthy of being documented and placed into one of three buckets: 1) Needs more discussion - book a time to continue discussion; 2) Not something to be acted upon - not a high priority; 3) Results in a decision that requires ownership, an action plan and measurable goals with time frames.
Ugly Executive Meetings - 3 Reasons:
1️⃣ Personal agendas and opinions take all the oxygen
I raise my hand of personally being guilty of this at times - especially earlier in my career. I would identify a topic that was impacting my team from meeting their goals, had a recommendation or even plan to address the root cause(s) and often that plan required “others” to do something different than what they were doing today. Being persuasive is a trait that comes naturally to me, and often helped my opinions hold weight… but also reduced the level of collaboration and shared commitment to actually addressing the issue, with a shared conviction across the team.
Beware the executive who consistently talks more and listens less! This is one reason why having a well structured agenda, coupled with an executive of the week who is responsible for leading the discussion using “SCORE” or similar framework with a bias to decision and action. This is especially valuable for those executives who are less extroverted, or prefer to have more time to think about the topic, gather the data and share their insights using a process that is less real-time and/or ad-hoc.
2️⃣ Vanity Metrics, reports and the new “dashboard of the week”
🛑 This is one of the most dangerous signs that an executive meeting is going to be less than productive and thus valuable! The introduction of new metrics, dashboards or reports by a department head at an executive team can be very attractive and yet destructive at the same time.
First, the introduction of the new “measurement” should first be vetted with the CEO prior to the executive team meeting. The measurement(s) should be highly correlated to a company level goal that is shared by the executive team. In addition, if the new measurement/metric is valuable, it should be consistently reported by the departmental head every quarter, and should be highlighted as to how it directly impacts the associated company level goal.
3️⃣ Infighting and finger pointing disguised as ideas
A classic strategy and tell-tale sign of an executive that feels like they are failing, or is insecure and as a reaction will blind-side a fellow executive team member in the meeting without highlighting and discussing the issue FIRST with their colleague.
The more sophisticated executive often disguises the finger pointing as an idea they heard at an industry event, saw at a previous company they worked at or comes from an industry leader that is well-respected. The issue in fact may be real, and the ideas valuable, but sharing the new idea with the executive responsible BEFORE the team meeting is a symptom of a healthy executive team, strong cross-functional relationships and a strong foundation for effective executive team meetings.
The CEO that allows this or even enables this by siding with the executive sharing the expertise is helping to create a culture of UGLY executive team meetings and moreover, a toxic executive team culture. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team is a wonderful book that uses a fable metaphor to highlight this point in much better and clearer detail than I ever could.
I have a bias for structure, process, action and the use of metrics to align departments and executives, which resonates throughout this week’s newsletter. I credit my favorite CEO, one that I worked under during the first 10 years of my career for this bias. Jack Welch, former CEO of GE when they were the benchmark for corporate leadership, was my role model during my management development, and taught me how to use data, metrics and benchmarking to understand and then improve any process and the resultant performance.
For the love of SaaS Metrics!!!
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