Do you have a pulse?

Hi, Team Massive Result’s Thursday’s Thoughts Do You Have A Pulse “Do you have a schedule of regular meetings?” is the question that is most predictive of a business’s ability to perform and grow at a high and consistent level. You see the rhythm of the meetings in your business is the heartbeat pulse at which your business beats. I once asked this question of a team who insisted that they met regularly. When I asked them what they meant by regularly they proudly boasted that they met, as a team, every quarter. Well, meeting quarterly might work for the village stamp collecting society but you are kidding yourself if you think that is adequate for a commercial operation in today’s rapidly changing world and yet I know that there are businesses that still don’t even meet quarterly. If you show me a problem in a business I will show you a failure of communication. Given that communication is so important to the smooth running of any business the challenge becomes how to achieve that communication in a regular, focussed and effective way. Hence the importance of the meeting rhythm. The number one habit referred to in Verne Harnish’s seminal book “Mastering the Rockefeller Habits” is the habit that John D. Rockefeller developed of meeting with his fellow directors every day. They did this over lunch and by doing so they quickly developed a stratospherically successful business, then known as Standard Oil. John D. Rockefeller is often regarded as the richest man in history. These regular, structured, focused meetings meant that the senior leaders were always on the same page and playing the same tune. It meant that they were aligned not only to the goals of the business but to the way the business operated, what I refer to as the Core Values. Their regular meetings meant that they were always accountable to each other for their individual performances and most importantly for the collective performance of the business. They were able to truly leverage the individual skills that each member brought to the communal effort because assigning collective “Think Time” and collective “Talk Time” was already part of their default diary. Why would we try so hard to attract the best talent to our business and then not allow them the effective space and opportunity to apply their intelligence to the growth of the business? How often do the key people in your business get together to combine their talents to the betterment of your business? How regular is your business pulse? How much collective “Think Time” do you facilitate? How much productive “Talk Time” do you promote? Of all of the questions that I ask, and I ask a lot, “Do you have a schedule of regular meetings?” is the question that is most predictive of a business’s ability to perform and grow at a high and consistent level.