How to Tone Up Without Going to the Gym!

6th January 2017

Most new year’s resolutions involve getting fitter and becoming more lean. They usually involve half-hearted commitments to go to the gym more often and cut down on eating the stuff we like. Hmmmm, seems doomed from the start.

This year however you could put your business through a get fit campaign which will lead to it becoming fitter and leaner and all that without a whiff of an exercise bike.

In our previous blogs we looked at why you should consider being more structured in your work and how setting some relevant business objectives brings focus to you and your staff. All this is of no use if you don’t monitor and review how you are doing this. We all love meetings, don’t we? Hours of putting together the meeting pack and then hours of sitting around a table going through endless stuff most of which you may not actually need to know about, the long-winded public explanations as to why you’ve not done something yet and collecting even more actions.

Well there is an alternative, and once you have experienced it, it is a revelation, particularly if you are a senior manager.

It usually starts with the business objectives we spoke about last time, and a degree of shift in emphasis, and oh yes, some discipline.

In essence you should only spend a short time on reviewing graphical data relating to any measures associated with your business objectives, and then only if the measure indicates an adverse trend. If its going well then don’t waste time reviewing it. The bulk of the meeting should look forward using leading indicators (as distinct from lagging indicators – we will look at these in a future blog) and focus on addressing those key business objectives, whose measures indicate, you may not achieve. Don’t spend hours writing down what people are going to do, that’s their day job so keep the meeting tight and focussed. The data you review should not have been specifically prepared for the meeting, it should be the data people are using on a daily basis to measure their activities. The minutes of the meeting should be short and limited to agreed actions required, and don’t wait until the next meeting to see if people have done their actions, that should be part of the daily management process.

Its quite hard to tear up your current management review meeting structure, but we’ve done this many times with companies big and small and the result is always the same, senior managers are freed to do more managing and staff feel more empowered. Less time is wasted on pointless meeting prep and unproductive meetings.

The discipline comes from keeping the meeting structure focussed and in putting in place the business objectives and process measures in the first place, however this meeting structure can work if its started and then used to determine what business objectives and measures the business needs.

Next time we will look at some of the ways data can be presented and why its important to have clear templates for everyone to use, in the meantime if you want to discuss this blog or any other aspect of getting your business fitter and leaner in 2017 give us a call here at Longsight, now where’s my coffee and cake.