I recently discovered a way to condense some of the live sessions I’m running within the program from their full length running time of over an hour to less than five minutes.
With all that’s going on, I think it’s more important than ever to be able to get high-level insight into a topic quickly and then be able to decide whether it’s relevant and useful to what you’re working on right now.
But then I thought to myself; why not share it more widely?
To kick it all off, I want to introduce you to a framework that I use in our business which, whenever we deviate from applying it, we tend to notice things don’t go as well.
It’s about this idea of handover.
Imagine you’re a racing driver. If your primary job is to win races, you can’t also be the person that drives the car into the pits, gets out, changes tyres, fills up the tank and does all the other things required to keep a car racing.
Often though that’s what happens when you’re missing something in your business which we call a Team Operating System.
When I spot a business that doesn’t have this nailed, there are usually a few obvious symptoms, but one obvious one is there are either no meetings or lots of meetings. When it’s lots, they’re not working. They’re just not hitting the mark. You end up with death by meeting.
That’s mainly a waste of time and an annoyance, but in the worst-case scenarios you end up with friction. A team of people who don’t work together, stress each other out, end up in conflict and fail to bring out the best in each other.
But, if you can get a common work of working establish that everyone can easily adopt you get very different outcomes
The goal in going through this is you can get
- Synchronisation
- Commitment. When you hand something off to a team member, they get it, they grab it, they run with it.
- An outcome-focus.
The framework is really about getting into a standard operating rhythm, and it’s got three parts:
#1 Forum, which is about what meetings you commit to and how often,.
#2 Format, which is about how long it takes and how it’s structured/
#3 Focus, which is about what you cover in each and what you don’t.
What kicks it all off though is something very personal which I commit the first 15 to 30 minutes of every Monday morning to do. It’s literally the first thing you do and the first thing everyone else in your team does.
It gives anyone who does it clarity over the week ahead – what’s urgent vs. what’s a priority – and means everyone is coming into the first check-in of the week really prepped and planned.
That’s the platform for your weekly check-in -30 to 60 minutes, quick-fire rounds and absolutely no strategic discussions – and also provides the basis for the daily updates your team will be able to share without actually having to meet.
Three simple questions answered at speed:
- What were the wins that we achieved last week?
- What are we focused on this week?
- What do you need from other people in the room?
Why no strategic?
That’s the job of your Monthly Strategic Session. It’s the place where all those strategic discussions can be cascaded forward, ensuring you can get the operational stuff done and focus on the strategy with the right mindset and get it done.
It’s in those monthly sessions we’re looking at metrics, reviewing progress on projects, and creating the agendas there and now. No “in advance” stuff where it’s not needed (just like Factfinding before the first meeting)
When you nail everything up to the monthly you’re flying and suddenly the quarterly progress sessions become focused and powerful. And in the meeting and getting the work done as we go next stage up is what I call quarterly progress.
It’s all about big picture alignment, making sure that what you’re working on and the focus you’ve got is the right one for your plan. We review the vision. We review the plan. We talk about quarter-by-quarter metrics (which give you a much better idea of trends than monthly anyway). We reset the targets.
At the end of it all – top of the tree – you have your Annual Refresh.
Does that make sense so far? If so, let’s dive into the training. I’m going to walk through each of the frameworks. I’ve also given you agendas in the toolkit too.
Let me just talk through some of the key principles and then we’ll run through the frameworks.
