Your Meeting of the Year

When are you going to have your best meeting of the year?   Next week?  Next month? 4th Quarter?

I may have already had mine the day before yesterday.  I set out in 2013 with the goal of more coffee and lunch meetings with more creative people to network, brainstorm, and gain ideas from to help kickstart the year.  And my meeting with Nicholas McGill, an acquaintance I've not seen for several years, ended up providing me with more value and inspiration than I ever imagined.

We have the potential to help each other with connections, business opportunities, and personal goal achievement--and it made me wonder why I let several years go by without reaching out to him.  We have our next meeting already on the calendar to follow up on the areas where we might be able to help one another.

In case you're wondering, this extremely bright talented young man runs his own company here in Northern California, Heroik Media, and has a team working with him transforming businesses, people, and heck--who knows, maybe the world next.  Watch Nicholas' two-minute video introduction--you won't be disappointed and it might inspire you to:

• Consider how you tell the world who you are
• Consider who you are in the first place
• Consider reaching out to Nicholas via email
• Consider that next coffee or lunch meeting you schedule.

When will be your best meeting of the year?

Driving the Message

Assuming that your top management team is meeting weekly or monthly, the next key to driving communication and messaging throughout your company is to meet with your "extended management" team at least quarterly. Here is where you share safety issues, financial performance, and progress against objectives.  This is all part of the "rhythm" required to make a company run at it's best.

Do You Have a "Dream Team?"

It's sometimes called a network, personal board of advisers, or mastermind group.  But I like this definition from Patti Johnson taken from the Success Magazine Blog site:  The Six People You Need on Your Dream Team.

1. The Pro
2. The Encourager
3. The Innovator
4. The Challenger
5. The Connector

Ooops, where's the 6th?

I'ts you.  But for most of us, we try everything as a solo-act.  Read the article and find the five people who will help you get where you want to go.

Organizational Clarity

Leaders need to personally be clear about their vision and their strategy.

And just as importantly, they need to do something with it.  Employees and the team must know the vision, and the top leader must take responsibility for ensuring the vision is shared.

How?  Constant messaging to employees.  I don't know of too many companies that over communicate. But the greatest ones do.

They create visual work places.

They post the score (how the company is doing in all measurable areas).

They communicate the goals to the employees often.

They communicate the successes, setbacks, and challenges often.

They are accessible and "make the rounds" often to socialize the goals, objectives, initiatives, and how the company is doing.

Question:  Do your team members know the goals and the score?

Mistakes on our Path

Mistakes properly dealt with lead to wisdom, as long as they're not made twice. They are sometimes part of our path to best practices.

What Gets Measured Gets Attention....

....and what gets attention gets results.  There's truth in this concept that "what gets measured gets attention--and what gets attention gets results."

It is difficult to deny that the goal of every organization must include “results.”  To go through the actions of business, transactions, product development, program initiatives, and tactical execution WITHOUT the attainment of results is in itself disappointing, but is totally unacceptable if the “results” were never the focus, not measured, not spoken about, unclear, and were not at the heart of the leader and his or her team’s focus and conversations.

How do you do this?  One way to start is to ask yourself “how visual is my workplace?”  If for instance, safety, on-time shipments, customer satisfaction, or profit margins are important--how do you keep track of those?  Better yet--how does your team and how do your employees keep track of those?

A visual workplace is one where the company metrics aren't a secret, where they're not shared only among the management team.

A visual workplace is one where the "vital signs" are posted, they are shared, and they are used in daily decision-making.  A visual workplace uses "dashboards" or charts or bulletin boards to post the progress against the stated goals and objectives.

And while you're considering sharing vital information--why not post your entire strategic plan?  Whether you post it for all employees or in your office for you and your team to review frequently--Verne Harnish has created some outstanding tools for business planning.  Review and download his templates and planning forms at http://www.gazelles.com/.

One of the Gazelle's primary principles is to create measurements and themes and post them for all to see--and to track the progress throughout the year.

Three keys to creating a visual workspace are:

1. Select a small number of metrics to measure that reveal the progress of the company and departments towards the top objectives.

2. Use dashboards and easy-to-read graphs or charts to convey the "green light/red light" status toward the goals.

3.  Keep them updated.

And finally, engage your team and employees in conversations regularly around the progress you're making.  Bring attention to the measurements--and you'll bring attention to the results.