Great Council

To develop and keep your strategy strong, you need a place for it to live and breathe in your business. Council meetings are that place. They help your business stay focused on its Positioning; create, track, and update Themes and Plans; and get feedback from employees and customers to stay in touch with their evolving Context. These meetings allow businesses to deliver outsized success across long timeframes.

Last week, we highlighted how to create a winning Positioning. Previously we covered evaluating and adapting Context. This week, we focus on the Council Meeting mechanism that keeps them strong, adapting, and relevant.

Purpose

In Good to Great, Jim Collins suggests the Council focuses on understanding and tuning what the business can be the best in the world at doing (the 'Hedgehog' understanding.) He explains the Council's job as exploring this understanding by asking the right questions, debating the answers, trying out resulting decisions, and ruthlessly evaluating their impact.

Council meetings are responsible for ensuring your business has focused time to stay in touch with its Positioning and Context. The Council owns business Context. It is where your strategy Adapts and Grows to keep internal resources and capabilities in sync with changing external trends. Context considers what's happening in categories like:  1. Competition; 2. Industry Evolution, Customer Preferences; 3. Substitute or Complementary Offerings; 4. Channel Usage; 5. Social, Cultural, Demographics; 6. Physical Environment; 7. Legal, Politics, Regulatory; 8. Technology; and 9. Economy.

Your strategy must continue to update and refine how you will compete to win within this evolving Context through your product market fit, go-to-market activities, and other activities and Themes. These meetings combine the idea of listening to customers, partners, and employees with a formal agenda focused on working “on” the business. Where other Rhythm meetings focus on execution, this meeting focuses on strategy and the Business Model itself.

In the best implementations, your Council is a series of cascading teams and meetings that get everyone in your business owning strategy. Council meetings occur at:

• The leadership team level, and
• Cascade to everyone

Leadership Team Council

To Collins, this team is ultimately successful by generating healthy debate to get the hedgehog concept and resulting strategy elements right. This team adds meaning, integration, and urgency to the businesses' overall Positioning, Themes and Plans. At the highest level the Council is a center of excellence to keep your Hedgehog concept and the resulting strategy alive and well. As with all improvement programs, the Council requires support, training, and time to mature and grow. (See the stages of maturing a Council.)

In this role, the Leadership Team Council is also the keeper of StrategyOS. They keep it documented, working, communicated, and adapting to the needs of the business. They tack what impacts Context, set Rhythm meeting schedules, and track scorecards and action items. (If you need a way to document StrategyOS pieces or other processes in the business, pick one of the many wikis available such as Notion.so.) They ensure the strategy continues to Adapt and Grow. They also help build the ability to execute strategy by coaching and training others at whatever level is needed for their scope of influence.

Collins gives 11 characteristics of this Council that include:

• Exists as a device to gain an understanding about important issues, insights, and ideas facing the organization
• At the senior level, 5-12 members come from a range of perspectives, but each member has deep knowledge about some aspect of the organization and/or the environment (Context) in which it operates
• Includes key members of the executive team but is not limited to its members, nor is every executive automatically a member
• Seeks non-egotistical advice and understanding; decisions remain the responsibility of the lead executive

The agenda can be more informal but requires the same Rhythm diligence as other meetings. Give special attention to the requirements for prework and minutes. Prework can mandate specific reading for the group, or reviewing documents, or tasks like completing assigned action items or visiting some number of customers or teams. Meeting minutes ensure the group's learning is archived for future use and expansion.

The meeting is typically a 1.5 hour work session with an agenda similar to:

1. Start with a round of good news to open up dialogue and build rapport (this is a good practice for any meeting.)
2. Give everyone two or three minutes to discuss one or two things of interest since the last meeting. This can come from: updating strategy tools, talking to customers, reading articles, experiencing a company service, team-level council input, noticing trends, etc. This is information, idea, and issue sharing and capture, but not a time to solve or dive deep.
3. Choose one or two topics from these ideas as the focus for the meeting. At times, there will be a pre-set topic to focus on an important issue or prepare for an upcoming quarterly or annual meeting.
4. Review and document key findings, next steps, decisions, and action items before adjourning. Distribute written minutes afterward as widely as possible.

Cascade to Everyone - Team-Level Councils

One thing Collins misses is the opportunity to make the Council a two-way dialog about strategy. This is accomplished with regular standing meetings that cascade to all levels of the business. This keeps everyone engaged in strategy and gets feedback from those who are closest to customers and real work.

Kraaijenbrink in One Hour Strategy, suggests hour-long team-level meetings once a month to get structured input from all team members. Lafley and Martin in Play to Win suggest ensuring each team understand their answers to the same 5 strategy questions used to create Positioning at each team level. Input from those on the front line who are closest to customers ensures all understand how they impact strategy and uncovers early signals when adjustments are needed.

Each level in the organization should schedule Team Council Meetings to create a strategy dialogue that discusses what they believe could affect shared business model elements. These meetings check across all Themes to ensure the team is tracking toward success.

A suggested agenda is:

• 2 min. Welcome by the manager: check if everyone is present and, if not, why.
• 10 min. Review current Themes and specific Plans being worked by the team.
• 20 min. Progress check: Did we make the right progress? Any Issues, Insights, or Ideas?
• 10 min. Relevance check: Do we still have the right business model and focused activities? Any Issues, Insights, or Ideas?
• 10 min. Mood check: Is everyone still on board? Any Issues, Insights, or Ideas
• 8 min. Closure, action items, and anything else that needs to be said.

The output of these meetings is a managed action item list specific to each team. Document issues and individual ownership for how to make incremental improvements in what they can do to deliver their part of Positioning, Theme, and Plan elements. Learning is also shared with the Leadership Team Council to help them understand any impacts in the business Context or the need for adjustment to the business model. This feeds the Adapt and Grow phase of StrategyOS.

How do you breathe life into your businesses' strategy? How might a Council help?

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Adventure humbly forward.