Some operational issues absolutely need to reach the leadership team, particularly when they cross departments or have a significant impact on the business. However, if your leadership team never has time to work on major issues such as broken processes, capacity, profitability, structure or long-term growth, it is worth looking closely at the level of issues filling your meeting.
Your leadership team meeting should not simply be another operational meeting with more senior people in the room.
It should be the place where your most senior people step back, look across the whole business & solve the issues that only they can solve.
I worked with a leadership team recently where we spent almost the entire issues-solving section of their meeting working through one of their core processes.
We did not simply talk about the fact that the process was not working. We pulled it apart, identified where the time was being lost & challenged some of the assumptions behind the way they had always done it.
By the end of that hour, the team had developed a different approach that could potentially reduce the time involved by as much as 40%.
That is an extraordinary return on one hour.
Of course, not every process can be documented, tested & rolled out during a single leadership team meeting. Some issues will require more work afterwards. Some will need to become priorities for the next 90 days. Others may need data, input from the wider team or a smaller group to work through the detail.
However, your leadership team can still use this issue-solving time to identify what is really broken, agree on the outcome you want, make the major decisions & give someone clear ownership of the next steps.
That is exactly what the meeting is there for.
The purpose of the issues-solving section is not to fill the remaining space on the agenda. It is the part of the meeting where the leadership team gets to work on the business rather than simply reporting on what has already happened or solving issues that should be handled elsewhere.
Used properly, those 60 minutes can remove bottlenecks, reduce wasted effort, improve profitability, strengthen accountability & make life easier for everyone underneath the leadership team.
The question is not whether you have time to improve your processes.
The better question is whether your leadership team is spending its time at the right level.
Before your next leadership team meeting, review your leadership issues list & ask:
Are these genuinely leadership team issues, or are we allowing operational detail to consume the meeting?
Then choose the one issue that, if solved, would save the business the most time, money or frustration.
Put it at the top of the list, protect the full issues-solving time & solve it properly.
And if your leadership team is regularly running out of time before it gets to the big issues, it may be time to take an honest look at whether your weekly leadership meeting is operating at the right level.
Clarity creates confidence. Preparation creates the space to find it.
