Guide to driving more effective leadership meetings

NB: At TekStack, we focus our efforts on B2B SaaS companies.  This guide to driving more effective leadership meetings is geared towards this audience.

Odds are that your company has a monthly management meeting.  Your team likely doesn’t come together enough as a collective.  Use this time to solve cross-functional challenges and think beyond lagging indicators.  Here are seven tips to make the crucial time together more productive.

1) Decouple the financial update

99 times out of 100, my experience has been that the date of the monthly management meeting is tied to the date that financials are made available.  Guess what!  That’s way too late!

You are unnecessarily delaying important conversations about the performance of your company. The information that you are waiting for from finance is hard to impact if you are halfway through the next period anyways. SaaS companies don’t have a ton of cost variability in their businesses.  In absence of raw material market fluctuations, your costs like people and rent are pretty much fixed each month.  Unless your MRR is driven by transactional models where you have cash flux, your biggest variability in the business comes from marketing spend, or services revenue. Yes, these are important, but you can easily run pro forma on marketing spend within a day of the month-end, and services revenue can easily be estimated using sub-ledger tools like your PSA system.  The rest of the financial metrics you should be looking at are either leading indicators or past bookings; all of which should be easily available from your CRM system, so why delay a meeting up to two weeks to discuss stuff that happened up to 45 days ago? It’s too late, you aren’t doing your business any favors.

Let finance publish financial statements when they can, let the CEO meet the CFO to discuss cash, key ratios, covenants; and all the other stuff.  Move a financial results conversation to the quarter-end.

2) Discourage presented metrics

Is your leadership team presenting their metrics from PowerPoint?  Ban it.  Odds are very high that the data is being massaged in Excel for the presentation.  This is bad news for many reasons:

• Your top execs may be spending more time finding or massaging key results data than actioning information, and they are doing this every month.
• If they must massage the information, it likely means the information is not being analyzed timely, its stale, and should have been actioned days or weeks earlier.  You might even question the source, hygiene, and validity of the data.
• The rest of the leadership team should have access to the information being presented at any point in the month. In fact, to achieve complete transparency, so should your board and employees.

If they are massaging data for each management meeting, make an investment in building the reports that the organization needs.  These should be all aligned to Objectives (more on planning strategies in another post) and should where possible include targets so you can compare target to actual variance.  This takes a bit of effort, not only building the reports but also making sure the data is collected with some hygiene.  You could always just implement TekStack and save yourself the effort. 😊

3) In fact, ban presentations!

Presentations do not encourage or enable conversation.  They are great tools to help visualize concepts in a 1:N setting but should not be used to facilitate conversations (N:N)  They are also enablers of half-baked thinking.  If you have a topic that needs to be addressed by the team, take the lead from incredible leaders like Jeff Bezos or Andy Grove. Encourage the use of the long-form narrative.  Long-form narrative forces the executive to actually think through the opportunities that need to be solved. It provides the reader with more information that can be used to facilitate conversation.

4) Allow more opportunity to discuss strategy

Guaranteed your team is not spending enough good time together.  When you come together as a team, everyone should take off their functional leadership hat. The product should contribute to sales, sales contribute to services, and so on. Limit conversation on metrics, encourage more time on key strategic issues or opportunities.

5) Focus on leading not lagging indicators

The time you do allow for metrics should be looking forward, not backward.  Lagging indicators give you a sense of your company’s performance relative to the plan. This is important, but what if you are off-plan? You have two options; Adjust to your new reality, or change your reality.

Both options need leading indicators, not lagging.  Leading indicators are the most important thing to discuss. Let’s take the example of the sales leader missing her/his target.  To fix the problem, they can’t do it alone.  Her/His lack of success is likely due to reasons they cannot control:

• Aggressive planning expectations
• Macro-economic factors
• Product-market fit
• Pricing alignment

Sure, there are other factors that could have impacted lagging results that are in control of your sales leader, but to impact the future you need to think about leading indicators.  In SaaS, results are predictable.  We should know our lead to opportunity conversion ratios, our win rates, average deal cycle length.  If those numbers are off, fix them.  Focus on leading indicators as a team.  Have a real conversation on what can be done to impact future success.

6) Invite team members to meetings

Encourage team members to join your leadership meeting.  A few things will happen.

• The level of professional conduct will go from x to 10!
• You’ll gain a new perspective. Software companies are often best led from an upside-down hierarchy, we are fortunate to be leading people who are smarter than we are.
• You’ll groom new leaders.
• You’ll create more transparency uniting the entire organization around goals, issues, or opportunities.

7) As a CEO, try on a servant leadership style

A few tips…

• Limit your voice to 5% of the meeting. (or less than a proportional amount)
• Encourage healthy respectful debate.  (Conflict can be good).
• Ask ‘Why?’.
• Ask this question “What would you recommend we do to solve this issue?” every single time someone asks for your opinion.