“Your meetings should be passionate, intense, exhausting, and never boring.” 

– Patrick Lencioni

Below is a format and agenda that works. We suggest you ‘Hit refresh’, stop what you’re currently doing, and simply adopt this format.

Agenda

1. Staff & Customer Headlines (5 mins)
2. Scorecard Review (5 mins)
3. Quarterly Sprint Priority Review (5 mins)
4. To Do List Review (5 mins)
5. Issue Solving (60 minutes)
6. Recap (5 mins)

The objective of the Scale Weekly Management Meeting is to:

• Understand and resolve current key issues facing the business, and
• Solve any issues faced in the Quarterly Sprint Projects,

first phase (agenda items 1-4) is short (15-20 mins), to identify potential issues for resolution, which are added to the issue list, which is then prioritised. The majority of the time assigned to issue solving. This forms the bulk of the meeting (60 mins), and any actions are put on the to-do list. The recap is then a review of the agreed actions (who needs to do what, by when).

Here is a breakdown of each section:

1. Staff & Customer Headlines

The key here is “headlines”. A member of staff has resigned. A customer relationship is in jeopardy. The time for this is intentionally brief. If this were a newspaper what is on the front page? Headline only, not the full story and not something that doesn’t belong on the front page. If it presents an issue (i.e. it’s not already being handled) then add it to the issue list. If you have 10 people in your meeting that’s 30 seconds per person, so keep it brief.

2. Scorecard Review

Refer to your Scorecard to review status on the key metrics for the past period. This needs to be a shortlist of key numbers with each expressed as: ‘On track’, ‘Target reached’, ‘Above target’, or ‘Below target’. If you’re using Monday.com add a column for “Last Updated” so you can easily see if the person accountable has updated their numbers.

This is not a full spreadsheet of weekly numbers or trends but a summary that can be used to manage goal performance. Naturally owners of these goals will have a supporting data set but for the purpose of this meeting we want to know if goals are on track or not. If anything is off track and of concern, it gets added to the issues list.

Examples: Revenue, Gross Margin, Average time to close a service request, Debtor days, £ value of overdue accounts, £ value added to pipeline.

3. Quarterly Sprint Priority Review

The Priority Review is to track the Sprint Projects set at Quarterly Planning. The relevant project plan must be updated with accurate progress on status of each item before the Weekly Meeting, and displayed during the meeting (this is an important detail – don’t just let people give a verbal update – get the plan up on the screen). Each Priority owner gives a short update, emphasising anywhere they are off-track, or stuck, to be added to the issues list.

4. To Do List Review

Review the outstanding To-do list to see if there are actions or items where team members are stuck or off-track. This ensures follow through on agreed actions, and picks up anything that isn’t getting resolved. Completed items should have been moved to a separate section so that you can only see outstanding items (easily done via an automation on monday.com). Also, using the creation log feature on monday makes it easy to see how long items have been on the list.

Add any ‘Stucks’ to the issues list. Most items on the list from the previous week should be anticipated to have been completed. However, be aware that issues do re-surface (make sure people feel it’s ok for the same stuck to be re-reported if it’s still an issue). Noticing this is important to identify root causes, or deeper issues at play. 

5. Issue Solving

Issue solving is where you allocate the majority of your time during the Scale Weekly Management Meeting. The list should have a clear description of the issue, a record of who recorded the issue and when. You should also record the date an issue is solved and a way to separate solved issues.

The first task is to prioritise your list. If you have more than 4 issues, focus on prioritising your top 3 to save time. If you solve all 3 you can return to prioritising. Once you have your top 3 follow the DDD process.

DDD: Determine, Diagnose, Decide.

The purpose of the DDD process is to improve the discussion and resolution of issues:

Determine: The stated problem is rarely the real issue. Therefore the first step is to dig down and find the real issue or root cause. Don’t move forward until you have clarified, stated and agreed upon the real issue. Sometimes you will uncover multiple issues. That’s fine, but exercise the discipline to prioritise which one to solve first so that your process and thinking remains clear.

Diagnose: Everyone must share their thoughts, ideas and concerns openly and honestly for discussion and debate. With everything on the table the solution is usually simple but sometimes not easy.

Decide: It’s more important that you decide than what you decide. The decision must be stated and agreed upon. Once agreed the action steps must be owned by someone and put on the to-do list.

80% of the time everyone will agree with the decision but the rest of the time they won’t and the person owning the decision will have to make the final decision. As long as everyone has been heard and the team is healthy they can usually live with the decision and must support it. There must be a united front moving forward.

5. Recap

There are 3 points to cover in your recap. To-do list, Communications and Meeting review.

1. Recap the to-do list and make sure every item has an owner accountable. It should include a description of the task, a person accountable, the date the item was generated, a completion date and a status, e.g. Working on it, Stuck, Done.
2. As a result of any decisions made are there any messages that should be communicated with others in the company? If so, add these to the to-do list to ensure completion.
3. Meeting review: Ask what could have been done better? Record this for continual improvement of the meeting and to avoid the meeting from atrophying; a common theme with company meetings.