Using Strategy Automation to Focus Your Weekly Leadership Team Meeting on Strategic Priorities
Your weekly leadership team meeting is probably the most expensive meeting you have each week. Your leaders are your most expensive resources, and collectively they have the wisdom to solve your toughest business challenges. Do you spend your weekly meeting solving problems?
Having served on dozens of B2B leadership teams, the answer is probably “no.” I commonly see weekly leadership meetings be more of a report-out to their colleagues on what their departments have been doing the previous week. It is an audible version of the weekly status report, which the leadership team had the opportunity to read prior to the meeting.
As we built a platform for Strategy Automation, we sought to solve this problem. If you are like most high-growth B2B technology companies, you have had some kind of strategy planning session for the year. You have set goals for your company. Even if your leadership team reviews progress towards your goals on a weekly basis, it is unlikely that you identify barriers towards meeting those goals, and actively develop solutions to remove those barriers as a team every week.
The requirements we identified for developing a more disciplined strategy management process were:
- Develop annual strategic initiatives that will accelerate the growth of the business based on a clear go-to-market strategy
- Set Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for those initiatives that measure outcomes, not activities
- Break those initiatives down each quarter to a set of imperatives that can focus the team on a stepwise achievement of the overall initiative
- Automate the calculation of the KPIs, so performance can be seen in real time on a visual dashboard
- Keep that dashboard front and center during weekly leadership team meetings, with visual cues that draw attention to problematic areas
- Focus weekly meetings on strategic issues, and prioritize issues that require collaboration by the entire leadership team
- Spend the majority of the time during the leadership team meeting solving strategic problems
- Track action items that come out of the leadership team meeting, with owners and due dates, and review them during the next weekly meeting to hold each other accountable
Just as strategic workflows are automated to develop go-to-market strategy in ayeQ, so, too, can these requirements be automated. ayeQ guides the leadership team with weekly status report workflows to reinforce the focus on strategy, prompting updates aligned to strategy imperatives, noteworthy updates relevant for the entire leadership team, the identification of strategic issues that require leadership team collaboration, and follow-up on assigned action items. All of these are synthesized into a weekly agenda that keeps the meeting focused on things that really matter for the growth and health of the business.
What we’ve found with companies using this approach to strategic management is much more engagement during weekly meetings, higher alignment across leadership team members, and better achievement of strategic objectives.
Don’t just have a weekly staff meeting each week because you think you should. Ask your leadership team whether they feel like these meetings are a critical use of their time. If you don’t get a resounding “yes,” maybe it’s time to explore strategy automation.
Interested in learning more? Join us for a live discussion and demo of the ayeQ platform on Thursday, May 28th at 1pm ET. REGISTER NOW
