One of our values at SHIFT is to help our clients share information to better engage and enable their people to drive the performance of their organization. We call the construction of regularly held, intentional conversations the System of Management (SOM).
There tend to be two primary areas of conversation: Planning at the leadership level and Engagement at the team level. These conversations generally are held in the form of a meeting between two or more colleagues.
I recently found myself in one of these conversations with a client. My role was to help construct their approach to sharing the “dots” of vision, strategy, organization goals, team goals, and individual goals. I worked to facilitate the connection of those dots through regularly held, intentional conversations. During our conversation, the client asked me why we didn’t just call the SOM a system of meetings. He wasn’t quite getting the point, so my answer was: because it’s about what the conversations produce not about having meetings.
His question is a valid one, and reminds us that it’s important to maintain the discipline of keeping the purpose of the organization in clear view at all times and continuously examining whether we’re aligning our decisions and actions with achieving that purpose. To do that well, here are some questions to ask yourself and those around you:
• What is the outcome we’ll create through having a conversation/meeting?
• Does that outcome support the pursuit of our purpose and the achievement of our goals?
• Are we making decisions and acting in a manner consistent with our values?
• How regularly do we need to meet?
• Who needs to be in the meeting?
• How do we connect what happens in this meeting to other conversations?
Meeting structures usually flow from larger to smaller, with the smallest being a 1:1 conversation usually between a team member and their direct supervisor. The 1:1’s are the most impactful, and information gathered in them must flow back up through meetings in order for organizations to perform at the highest level. With flatter organization structures becoming more common, it’s useful to consider whom an individual can meet with who can be most valuable to them in supporting their development and success.
If it looks like a meeting, and acts like a meeting … it’s probably a meeting. If it is an intentional conversation focused on engaging and enabling high performance, it’s probably part of a well-considered and even better executed System of Management. Perhaps we should call it a System of Success … but it’s definitely not (merely) a system of meetings.
