Meeting Effectiveness – Productivity

I am self-professed productivity junky. There I said it. My life’s motto is summed up as “how can I do things better”. I recently had coffee with an older gentleman who is also a self-professed productivity junkie. I told him I had always had an affinity for process and improving how things work.

When I told him how excited I was when I first discovered David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) he smiled and told me about how he had worked with David Allen for five years and was also a GTD evangelist. We hit it off from that first meeting and have found more ways to get together to discuss our common interests.

What Are Lead Measures?

As I reflected on our meeting my mind drifted to other productivity-related concepts that we could talk about during our next get-together.   One of my all-time favorite productivity books is The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals (WIGs).  If you have read, The 4 Disciplines of Execution, then you know that Discipline #2 is Act on the Lead Measures.

So what are lead measures?  Lead measures are somewhat of an interesting concept.  While a lag measure tells you if you’ve achieved the goal, a lead measure tells you if you are likely to achieve the goal.  If we are truly looking to influence our present behavior so that we can reach some future goal then it makes sense to have some way of measuring our progress along the way.

This is where lead measures prove extremely helpful.  It is helpful to think of lead measures as a “just in time” assessment of how we are progressing towards the goal or outcome that we desire.  If you buy into the concept of lead measures then the next question you are going to ask yourself is what lead measures can I use to determine if I am going to hit my intended goals or outcomes.

Follow The Data

One classic example of lead measures comes to us from America’s favorite pastime, baseball. The Oakland Athletics reinvented scouting and recruiting in baseball. They asked a very simple question.  What produces wins?  

The obvious answer was the highest number of runs.  The team with the most runs wins the baseball game.  So the next question was what lead measures can help us predict the creation of runs?  Oakland discovered that the mighty sluggers were not the answer they were looking for.  They discovered that the most productive players, in terms of runs scored, were the players that could get on base the most often.

These players could score runs more reliably than the power hitters who commanded astronomical salaries. So Oakland’s simple formula was to track on-base percentage for players and to recruit the players with the highest on-base percentage.  For a decade this simple formula allowed the Oakland A’s to maintain the 5th best record in baseball while ranking 24th in player salaries.

This simple lead measure allowed Oakland to drive consistent results over a sustained period of time.

Communication, The Vehicle For Our Meetings

Coming up with the right lead measures is really about helping everyone in your organization see themselves as strategic business partners and engaging them in a dialogue about what can be done to achieve the organization’s goals.

In a recent study, Gartner reported that 75% of information technology (IT) projects failed to deliver on time and within budget.  This is a staggering failure rate and if you look at the reasons reported you are left scratching your head and wondering, really.  Gartner presents a litany of reasons but when you dig a litter deeper you realize that almost all of the reasons are derived from a common source.

That common source is a breakdown in communications.  Similar to the Oakland A’s we must ask ourselves what will produce success in our projects.  And the answer is better communication.   When it comes to projects the main vehicle for communications is the business meeting and therefore we believe that the main culprit for the 75% failure rate is a breakdown in the business meeting.

At MeetingResult we believe that any project-based organization should include meeting effectiveness as one of their lead measures.  In our vast experience running thousands of meetings and consulting extensively with project-based organizations, the individual business meeting is a completely overlooked lead measure for how projects are performing.

Assess The Effectiveness Of Your Meetings

Fix your meetings and you will fix your projects.  Fix your projects and you will fix your business. And the first step is to diagnose the problems with your meetings.  We have developed a meeting assessment tool called the meeting effectiveness evaluation tool (MEET) to help you gain important insights into your current meeting process and target areas for improvement.

We provide a custom report one week later that gives you a deep dive into your organization’s meeting performance with specific recommendations for sustainable improvement.  Email us at info@meetingresult.com to learn more and get started.

If you are not currently a user of our MeetingResult meeting management software we offer a free 14-day free trial and a complimentary, one-on-one training session to help you get started. Click here to learn more and get started with your free 14-day trial.  

 

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