Meeting structure

No matter what other side assignments we might have in our assistant scope, meetings are something that is always present. My manager has meetings basically all the time. We often discuss how to create air in his calendar but that is a huge challenge. The result is that the days are mostly filled with meetings from early until late. For some it might seem unrealistic when I tell them that he does not even have 15 minutes available but that is really the truth.

Within the Volvo Group there is a lot of cooperation ongoing in different cross functional fora´s on a global arena. The meetings often need to follow a special sequence in the month and take into account all the different time zones and all other busy manager´s agenda´s. On top of that comes all other regular meetings not to forget the prep meetings and the prep before prep meetings, the individual employee dialogues and all those urgent meetings that occurs in any company. I and my manager have listed all "other" recurrent meetings with prioritization and delegation information so that I know how to navigate when he gets double (or triple) booked.

The coordination of the Volvo Group meeting governance started already in January 2015 for the calendar year 2016. And any day now the three EVP assistants for our Group Trucks companies (Technology, Operations & Group Trucks Sales) are starting to look into the specific governance for the Group Trucks meeting structure 2016. Once the "big picture" is ready I and my SVP assistant colleagues can start to plan for our managers other meeting interfaces. We usually get a first draft of the year to come plan somewhere in late Q3. And after I have done the overall GTT Q&CS planning I pass the governance further down in our organization so that the other managers can also plan their calendars with the big picture in mind. There is no doubt that this is a very challenging task.

Whenever new meetings needs to be squeezed in during the year that includes managers with the same "problematic" calendars the meeting organizer preferable calls for a meeting with all assistants to concerned managers, to be able to schedule the meeting (s) jointly. When talking over the phone we can all view our bosses calendars simultaneous and also share possible slots where we can reschedule other meetings to accommodate for the new. I have those meetings very often, both cross functional with other SVP assistants in GTT and with other assistants globally in the Volvo Group whom have managers that are involved in the same quality governance structure as my manager. When we need to make this advanced puzzles as I like to refer to it, e-mailing back and forth would just be a time consuming activity. Planning meetings in our global and cross functional environment is a science in itself. How is it in your workplace?

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I want to touch base on one more topic concerning meetings. And that is the meeting structure that we have in our Q&CS management team. We have been working one year now with a concept based on the book "The Advantage" of  Patrick Lencioni. I will not go in to all the parts of this book but it is about "organizational health". One part of that is the meeting structure.

When I started to organize the agendas we had management meetings every second week where we added all kinds of topics and mixed presentations with strategic dialogues. Since a bit less than a year back we started organizing us differently. We now separate informational topics from strategic topics that need a discussion followed by a decision. And every second week we add a type of meeting called "Free Flow" where we do not have a prepared agenda. In the free flow meetings we go around the table and each person will in two minutes highlight areas where they need support. After that we review our current common objectives & goals to see where we are. We mark them red or green and after we spend the remaining time discussing the red items and other highlighted issues where the team needs to support each other. For a management team spread out over the globe, working in different functions with each their specific objectives and goals, this is a good format to align. It took a while to get into it but it nowadays works really fine.

The final type of meeting is what we call the Quarterly Review meeting. That is when we preferable meet Face to Face. The agenda should be strategic of nature to utilize the time spent together for discussion, take important decisions and to work forward.

It is my task to plan & coordinate those different types of meetings that all have their specific little process. I do it by keeping track of our action log and when things are ready to be presented, as information or reviewed and discussed in a strategy meeting, I plan for that. I also collect items that I obtain from meetings and other input, compiles it and keep an ongoing dialogue with my manager and the strategy department to align. Creating the Quarterly Review agenda is the most challenging since it starts Monday and ends Friday. When I coordinate I always use the feedback from previous meetings to improve the structure. This is actually one of my favorite tasks. Because building the Quarterly Review meeting agendas is both a strategic process and a practical matter. The agenda should be well balanced and contain the right issues. And all the practicalities around it need to work.

At this point it is time for me to continue finalizing for our Quarterly Review meeting that will be held week 23 in Gothenburg. There is always fine-tuning to do on the agenda and some practical details need to be put in place.

When I start typing the words just comes and I notice that my posts are getting way longer than intended. But I just find it a very nice opportunity to reflect and to share. I hope you have enjoyed following me so far :-) Tomorrow & Friday my challenge will be to make shorter blog posts.