THE toughest management challenge, as the leader of a growing business, is getting your DNA passed down to the next generation of leaders – those middle managers who either make your life easier by carrying a large management load of the business or wreak havoc as they repeat many of the same mistakes you thought were already resolved earlier in the company’s history.
Groundhog Day
Once you get over 40 employees and you start to fill out a middle management level in the company, you start to experience your own ‘Groundhog Day’ movie moments, where it feels like you’re reliving the same frustrating day, day in and day out. The only viable solution I’ve found for developing an outstanding middle management and supervisory team is pulling them all together and spending four to eight hours each month collectively focused on the priorities and challenges of the business.
It’s in the process of wrestling common issues, challenges, and opportunities ‘to the ground’ together that you, as the leader of your company, are able to share your industry knowledge, thought processes, approaches to problem solving, and core values. In addition, it provides you and your senior team real insight into ‘who’s getting and who’s not’ among your middle managers, letting you know with whom you might need to spend a little more time training and coaching.
It’s also a convenient time to provide some collective training and education.
Agenda
Gene Kirila, named the youngest hero of manufacturing in the US, is the one who turned me on to this key management meeting. In every one of the businesses he built, he would gather all his team leads, supervisors, middle managers, and senior leaders together and host them the third Thursday of each month at his lake cabin – just 30 minutes from his factories. He expected everyone in management to give up one evening a month to work on the business.
Starting at 4pm he would gather his 12 to 15 middle and upper managers together and follow a strict 12-point agenda: growth report – good news and actions needed; drivers of reputation and productivity report, and actions needed; discipline report on priorities, metrics, meeting rhythm; numbers – performance indicators, financial report and actions needed; market report on customers’ and competitors’ news and actions needed; intellectual capital/people report and actions needed; corporate calendar of events and process reviews and actions needed; action teams and committee report and actions needed; glossary of terms updates; decision time – people, cash, execution, strategy; quarterly action plan report and actions needed; review of the on-page plan and consensus on edits then publish for sign off.
Number of participants
You can figure having seven to 12 per cent of your total number of employees in these monthly meetings since this represents the typical range of management span of control within most organisations. This means for a firm with 400 employees, I’ve seen 40 to 50 supervisors to senior managers involved in these monthly meetings. This is actually and ideal number of participants if you want to maximise the diversity of ideas while keeping the meeting manageable.
For Gail Johnson, CEO of education program provider Rainbow Station, the meetings involve the directors of her six corporate-owned sites, two vice-presidents, her CFO, facilities manager, and herself. With about 175 employees in the core business, she knows it would also be ideal if she figured out how to include her franchisee partners as well. This would put her closer to the 10 per cent figure.
Tangible results
At transportation workforce solutions provider TransForce, the monthly day-long management meeting has been in place for just over a year. Named the ‘executive leadership series’ it falls between their quarterly board meetings and the annual general managers conference.
Tangible results include creating a strategy that has resulted in: a new multi-year contract valued at more than $2 million per year; naming two fundamental elements of their DNA and building into their branding and marketing efforts; and identifying the need to hold periodic focus group meetings with various field managers.
“While there are multiple tangible results and benefits we’re realising from our monthly meeting series, perhaps the most important is the fact that we have a chance to step off the intense daily merry-go-round of running the business to dedicate some very intentional time to forward looking strategic planning and the development of a shared vision,” TransForce COO Larry Parrotte says.