We suspect you’ve been in at least one meeting that lasted an exorbitant amount of time and after you and your colleagues left the meeting practically nothing came from it. What an incredible waste of time!

Now, if that experience was a once-a-year occurrence, it would probably be palatable. But if it’s a more frequent occurrence, that’s an organisation killer!

Effective leaders make effective use of their, and their team’s, time.

Meetings must be focused and drive real results.

You’re strategy should be the cornerstone of focus. There is definitely a place for looking into short-term matters such as budgets and firefighting, but ultimately, as leaders of a business your meetings must continually drive the business towards executing its strategy.

If we’re not being direct enough, then perhaps this is more clear.

Many businesses can do strategy planning. Many have ok strategies. What separates the good from the great? Those who focus on getting the right things done!

Your meetings, and the actions and accountabilities which come from them, are directly linked to how well you execute your strategy. They influence how your business does things that little bit better than your competitors, and therefore how it reaps the rewards that come from doing so.

At this point, ask yourself, of the last few meetings you’ve been to, have you and your team:

1. Even discussed your strategy?
2. Know the key strategic focus for this quarter?
3. Of the things discussed in the meetings, was anyone given direct responsibility to take action?
4. At the next meeting, is it crystal clear what everyone’s accountabilities are?
5. When it comes to the next meeting, will people actually be held accountable?
6. Are there common problems which may garner discussion but no action? Probably because there is no clear decision-making process.
7. Are your meetings ruled by consensus decision-making?

Just like everything in business, we learn what is best practice and how to implement it. Learning how to have effective meetings is no different.

Let us know if you’re ready for better meetings, and the rewards which follow.

Managers are often domain experts in what the business makes; but they often lack the skills to lead the business to sustained success.

This is partly because little time is devoted to training and coaching leaders in the necessary business skills. Here’s why this should not be the case.

If you watch enough of our videos you’ll notice on several occasions us quoting Ayman Al-Abdullah, now business coach and former CEO of App Sumo – a business Ayman grew from $3million to $80million in revenue. This is because he is incredibly good at distilling down important business leadership insights. So, here’s a social media post by Ayman:

He begins with quoting JFK: “Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other”.

Ayman follows up with:

“Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.” -JFK

Too many leaders think that achieving a leadership position means they have all the answers and don’t need to learn anymore

But in reality, it’s the exact opposite

— Ayman Al-Abdullah 🧱 (@aymanalabdul) July 6, 2023

Whether or not too many leaders think they have all the answers and don’t need to learn anymore is debatable. But, we certainly agree with the sentiment that learning commonly becomes a lower priority.

So, Ayman continues and this is where he starts to make a very powerful point:

As leaders, we should seek to learn more

We don’t have all the answers

And improving our knowledge just slightly could lead to huge changes across the organizations we lead

— Ayman Al-Abdullah 🧱 (@aymanalabdul) July 6, 2023

That’s a very powerful thought. The fact that even incremental learning by leaders can influence profoundly upside improvement for a business because of leveraging that acquired knowledge and skills.

If you’re in agreement that business owners, leaders and managers should be continuously improving their capabilities, then the key consideration is how.

Three key challenges for building and honing capabilities are generally:

1. When and how much time to dedicate to it.
2. What should one learn.
3. How should that learning and capability building take place.

We’re an evidence-led firm and prefer to follow the rigorous science on this. However, for the moment at least, we’re not aware of definitive evidence heavily directing us to a certain approach. Given this, we let science direct us as best it can and we continue to evolve learning best practices over time – just the same as with how we should learn all our business skills.

So, with regards to when and how much time to dedicate, it depends on what is being taught, what are the current capabilities, what is the urgency to acquire the capabilities, what is the capacity to learn, especially given other time demands, and how to mitigate the forgetting curve. The more new and novel the learning, the more likely it is that learners need to regularly commit time to learn.

What should one learn, should be directed by your strategy, current capabilities and critical business areas that science has shown to have the greatest influence on business success.

How should the learning and capability building take place, is similarly influenced by the afore-mentioned factors. There are a mixture of learning options available, such as impactful sprints involving face-to-face and online material, online courses, group meetings for rising stars and personalised coaching for business owners and CEOs.

If you take only two things away from this video, then make them these:

1. Improving leaders’ capabilities can have a profoundly positive multiplier effect due to leadership leverage; and
2. Learning is about building and improving capabilities. It has to produce results, not knowledge that’ll soon be forgotten.

We offer impactful learning programmes tailored specifically for our business clients, and also host leadership improvement programmes through Munro’s Business Academy. So please do take advantage of this if enhancing your team’s performance is of interest to you.