Prioritize meeting agenda items according to each issue’s impact on your company’s long-term value.
Measure the Real Value of Every Agenda Item Specify why participants must read them (e.g., for information only? discussion and debate? decision making?) This readies participants to devote precious meeting time to deciding crucial issues. Focus on Decisions, not DiscussionsĮnhance the quality and pace of your team’s decision making, for example by distributing reading materials in advance of meetings. The board now spends slightly less time together-but devotes much more of that time to strategy, typically about 10 hours per month.
But market changes required a more strategic focus. Example:ĭutch banking giant ABN AMRO’s board used to spend only about an hour per month on strategy, with most of its meeting time devoted to day-to-day operational details. Holding separate meetings for each prevents day-to-day operations from dominating your team’s agenda and liberates time for substantive strategy debates. Your reward? Strategic decisions-made better and faster.Īpply these practices to make the best use of your leadership team’s time: Deal with Strategy and Operations Separately And move issues off your agenda as quickly as possible. Use meeting time for decision making-not just discussion-and agree on what was decided. Put real choices on the table, evaluating at least three viable options for every strategy. Deal with operations separately from strategy. How can your leadership team avoid such pitfalls? Spend your limited time on issues exerting the greatest impact on your company’s long-term value. One global firm spent more time each year selecting its holiday card than it did debating a vital Africa strategy. The consequences? Delayed decisions that lead to wasted resources, missed opportunities, and poor long-term investments. Worse, many teams fritter away those precious hours on unfocused, inconclusive discussion rather than rapid, well-informed decision making. That translates into less than a week per year. Most leadership teams spend just three hours per month making strategic decisions. In companies that have done this, management meetings aren’t a necessary evil they’re a source of real competitive advantage.
#TIME WASTED SERIES#
Strategy making can be transformed from a series of fragmented and unproductive events into a streamlined, effective, and continuing management dialogue. Once leadership teams get the basics right, they can make more fundamental changes in the way they work together. And they insist that, once a decision is made, they stick to it-that there be no more debate or mere grudging compliance. They use a common language and methodology for reaching decisions. They make sure they have considered all viable alternatives before deciding a course of action. They seek to get issues not only on, but also off, the agenda quickly, keeping to a clear implementation timetable. In setting agendas, they rank the importance of each item according to its potential to create value for the company. They explore issues through written communications before they meet, so that meeting time is used solely for reaching decisions. They keep strategy meetings separate from meetings focused on operations.
But a few deceptively simple changes in the way top management teams set agendas and structure team meetings can make an enormous difference in their effectiveness.Įfficient companies use seven techniques to make the most of the time their top executives spend together. Delayed strategic decisions lead to overlooked waste and high costs, harmful cost reductions, missed new product and business development opportunities, and poor long-term investments. The price of misused executive time is high. And that time is poorly spent in diffuse discussions never even meant to result in any decision. In the typical company, senior executives meet to discuss strategy for only three hours a month. Companies routinely squander their most precious resource-the time of their top executives.
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