You should be aware that the quality of the people you employ makes or breaks your business, yet the quality of your HR policies provide the structure around which your teams behave. There are some hot issues at the moment including industrial relations reform and workplace bullying which can cost you your business if you do not have the proper systems in place.

The Advisory Firm can set-up your business to meet your statutory obligations. Further to this are there to assist you in dealing with issues which need to be immediately addressed before they have the chance to escalate and damage your business:

- Incident and Complaint handling
- Performance and Dismissal Management
- Recruitment, training and Selection
- Occupational Health and Safety
- Remuneration, Salary Packages and Job Descriptions
- Government Subsidies and Grants

If your business needs to improve moral, inject energy, ideas and cohesion The Advisory Firm operates as a corporate mentoring partner too and can offer targeted workshops which improve skills, refresh skills, foster relationships and open communications processes. We can help to invigorate you business into a learning organisation.

If you would like to have a consultant speak with you about the HR areas of concern about get in touch.

Ask The Advisory Firm about the obligations you are unsure of or workshops you believe your team could benefit from and we can present you with what you need.

Read our Fast Answers on Managing your Board and Managing your Executives - go here

The Advisory Firm: Key Concept: Effective Meetings

Executives and knowledge workers in general need to meet frequently, for what is a knowledge economy company without the sharing of knowledge (and information needs)?
Yet meetings seem to be unpopular in most organizations. They are regarded as a necessary evil—perhaps not really necessary; just an unavoidable evil. In work days filled up by highly demanding, multitasked schedules, meetings often feel like a drain on valuable time, yet they keep multiplying. It surely makes sense to manage meeting so that each one pays back more than it costs.

How to do ensure that this happens? One of the most thorough and promising answers to that question has been provided by Patrick Lencioni in his 2004 business fable, Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable. According to Lencioni, bad meetings are “the most painful yet underestimated problem of modern business.” He distills the badness of meetings down to two main problems: meetings are tedious, unengaging, and dry; and the time spent together by the top executives is used ineffectively.

Lencioni describes a cure for bad meetings both in The Fable, the tale of Casey McDaniel, the founder and CEO of Yip Software and his desperation in the face of a takeover plot, and in a 35-page section on “The Model,” which sets out the underlying ideas on organizing meetings optimally. Description The first of the two major reasons why meetings fail to accomplish as much as they should—and why they cause employees to disengage—is that they are tedious, dry, and boring. Meetings are boring when they lack drama. Lencioni points out that a meeting and a movie take about the same amount of time. We typically enjoy movies much more than meetings. This is despite the fact that meetings, unlike movies, are interactive, and they are directly relevant to our lives. To fix the boredom and tedium of meetings, then, we should make them more like movies by introducing productive forms of drama.

The way to do this is to “set up the plot” from the start by jolting participants during the first ten minutes. This establishes the “hook” for the drama. High art isn’t necessary; giving participants something to care about is. The leader must then “mine for conflict” to keep people engaged. This means the leader must make it a priority to seek out and uncover any important issues about which team members don’t agree, and must force members to engage in conflict even when they don’t want to. The final element is what Lencioni calls “real-time permission.” When team members take risks for the first time by actively engaging each one another in debate, the leader can reduce the discomfort and keep the conflict going by interrupting the participants and remind them that what they are doing is good. Lencioni intends here to separate personal from cognitive or task conflict, encouraging the latter while discouraging the former.

The second of the two major reasons why meetings fail to accomplish as much as they should is that the time spent together by the top executives is used ineffectively. This ineffectiveness results from lack of contextual structure. By mixing together the various ingredients suited to different kinds of meetings, you end up with “meeting stew.” Lencioni’s cure for the lack of contextual structure is to replace the general-purpose meeting with four types of meetings, each having a unique function: the Daily Check-In, The Weekly Tactical, The Monthly Strategic, and the Quarterly Off-Site Review.

The Daily Check-In: This is a five minute meeting whose purpose is to avoid confusion by having people share their daily schedules and activities. The two main challenges in making the Daily Check-In work are getting team members to stick with it initially, long enough to make it part of their routine, and keeping it to five minutes. The solutions are to keep the meetings consistent in location and timing, not canceling even when some people can’t be there; prohibit people from sitting down; keeping it administrative; and being extremely disciplined about ending the meeting after no more than ten minutes.

The Weekly Tactical: This type of meeting lasts for 45-90 minutes, during which team members review weekly activities and metrics, and resolve tactical obstacles and issues. The Weekly Tactical has two overriding goals: resolution of issues and reinforcement of clarity. The essential elements of the Weekly Tactical are the lightning round, the progress review, and a “real-time agenda.” This last feature means the agenda should be set only after the lightning round and regular reporting activities. Lencioni refers to the leader’s skills in handling such an agenda as disciplined spontaneity. The inevitable challenges arising for Weekly Tacticals are the temptation to set an agenda ahead of time; going into too much detail during the lightning round; and the temptation to get into discussions about long-term strategic issues. The keys to success are not to set the agenda until after initial reporting and to postpone strategic discussions.

The Monthly Strategic: The third type of meeting typically lasts for two to four hours, during which the team should discuss, analyze, brainstorm, and decide upon critical issues affecting long-term success. Lencioni says these are the most interesting and in many ways the most important type of meeting for any team. The length of the meeting will vary, depending on what is to be discussed, but at least two hours per topic should be scheduled. The meetings must take place regularly, so executives know there will be a place to discuss strategic issues that come up during the Weekly Tactical meetings. All but this last point apply to Ad Hoc Strategic Meetings, which are held when a strategic issue is especially urgent. The inevitable challenges for Monthly and Ad Hoc Strategic meetings are failure to schedule enough time; putting too many items on the agenda; failing to do research and preparation ahead of time; and fear of conflict. The keys to success are to limit the meeting to one or two topics; to prepare and do research; and to engage in good conflict.

The Quarterly Off-Site Review: The final type of meeting takes place over one or two days. Its purpose is to review strategy, industry trends, competitive landscape, key personnel, and team development. The inevitable challenges of Quarterly Off-Sites are the tendency to overburden and over-structure the meetings; making the meetings too much of a boondoggle; and inviting outsiders to attend. The keys to success are not to overstructure or overburden the schedule; to focus on work and to limit social activities; and to get out of the office environment.

The Advisory Firm Concept Commentary
Matching meeting form to meeting function makes good sense, for the reasons identified in Lencioni’s model and dramatized in his story, Death by Meeting. His particular division of business meetings into four separate types is not the only way to accomplish this goal, but does seem well-crafted. It adheres to the principles (established by research) of separating personal conflict from task conflict, and of separating discussions requiring different levels of depth. His system gives each kind of concern a time and place where it can be the center of focus and, by doing so, reducing the pressure to insert inappropriate items in other meetings.

Read our Fast Answers on Managing your Board and Managing your Executives - go here

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