Tag Archives: review meetings

Do & Review, Executive Reviews, Operations, Presentations

Maximizing the Value of Review Meetings

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Periodic reviews are critical for keeping important initiatives, functions, and projects on track in an organization. However, maximizing the value from review meetings takes thoughtful effort from both the reviewers and those presenting their work (the reviewees).

Too often, one or both do not put in the necessary preparation or exhibit good practices during the review resulting in an unproductive meeting. By understanding and executing on the key responsibilities for each role, reviews can be transformed into productive learning experiences.

Responsibilities of the Reviewer

  • As a reviewer, you have the vital role to create an environment conducive to an open and honest discussion. This starts well before the meeting with your careful review of pre-read materials. Your job is to develop informed questions and hypotheses to pressure test during the meeting itself.
  • A best practice is to share your initial questions and perspective with the reviewee in advance. This allows them to understand where you are coming from, hone their thinking, and essentially start the review meeting before it officially begins. Provide framing upfront for a more productive dialogue in the review.
  • Once in the meeting, resist the urge to jump straight to your pre-conceived notions. Instead, actively listen to the reviewee’s presentation with an open mind. Ask clarifying questions to ensure you fully understand the current state and ask well formulated questions to push up thinking, before offering opinions or advice. The best reviewers make the reviewee feel heard and can see the situation through their eyes.
  • With a common understanding established, it’s then time for hard questions. Don’t hold back . Say what needs to be said and apply pressure to the reviewee’s thinking. Challenge assumptions, probe for gaps or inconsistencies, and push to consider alternative perspectives. However, do it in a constructive way, being careful to separate the person from the points.
  • Finally, provide clear guidance on the path forward, explaining your thought process. Remain open to final thoughts from the reviewee before setting expectations. Keep the review a two-way dialogue, i.e., a quest for truth!.

Responsibilities of the Reviewee

  • Presenting during a high-stakes review meeting is highly stressful. However, reviewees must resist the urge to treat it as a one-way presentation. Effective reviewees embrace the meeting as a collaborative problem-solving session by being vulnerable and open to feedback.
  • The preparation should focus not just on materials summarizing the current state, but also anticipating the tough questions reviewers are likely to ask. Be ready to back up your assumptions, analysis, and recommendations with data and reasoning. At the same time, avoid being overly attached to your original ideas and be open to altogether change coursing course based on the discussion.
  • During the meeting, reviewees should temporarily park their leadership responsibilities. Resist giving into the urge to justify everything. Instead, actively listen (i.e., repeat back to the speaker what you heard) to be sure you understand reviewers’ perspectives, concerns and recommendations with a beginner’s mindset, as if hearing it for the first time. Ask clarifying questions, take detailed notes, and extend the discussion with a genuine desire to learn.
  • With reviewers’ guidance absorbed, the hard work is still ahead. Reviewees must internalize and promptly act on the suggestions, including updating plans and re-doing analysis as needed.

Summary

High quality reviews are hard work for both parties. Reviewers must create a psychologically safe environment, genuinely understand the current state before reacting, and then push reviewees’ thinking while providing clear guidance.

Reviewees in turn must be vulnerable, keeping an open mind to altogether pivot based on the discussion and immediately implement the feedback through more work. Shirking these responsibilities leads to disastrous review meetings that simply check a box. Whereas, embracing the mindsets and following the suggestions above turns reviews into powerful tools for accelerating success.

See Also

Do & Review, Manage to Lead

How to connect the Top-of-the-House to the FrontLine

When top leaders are informed, thinking critically, and engaged enough to provide guidance and direction, things tend to go pretty well. That is, things get done better, sooner, and more smoothly when leaders pay attention. This note describes an efficient way for top leaders to get and stay up-to-speed, see and understand what is going on, ask questions and think critically, develop a point-of-view, and provide advice and guidance on their organization’s most important functions, projects, and initiatives.

Nearly all of the things that cause activities and initiatives to go off track (see Kotter’s list of eight reasons initiatives fail) could be averted if someone in a position of authority had been involved enough to give guidance along the way.  It is hard, though, for leaders to stay sufficiently engaged even in the most important activities and initiatives because it takes time and focused attention that is easily diverted to other urgent matters.

It Pays to Pay Attention

There are a lot of reasons why a given activity or initiative might be considered important.  For example, it may be relatively large; risky; involve skills, technology, and methods that are new to the organization; have the potential for great leverage in terms of intellectual property development, revenue generation, cost savings, or skill development.  When an activity or initiative is important, it is also important that the effort stays on track, on time, and on-budget!

The best way to ensure on track, on time and on-budget performance are for top leaders to regularly review with those responsible for completing the activity or initiative how things are going.  Doing so provides an opportunity for:

  • Activity and initiative leaders to step back from the press of day-to-day in order to pull together a consolidated picture of what they are doing to share with others in a safe environment, to challenge their thinking, and to provide advice and counsel on strategy, focus, next steps, and to provide guidance, ideas, and resources that can be brought to bear so as to increase the odds of success.
  • Top leaders to stay in touch with what is going on with frontline activity. Any important activity (e.g., delivery, sales, development, marketing, strategic initiatives, etc.) should be reviewed regularly to keep leaders informed about what is going on and for leaders to efficiently provide guidance and direction, consolidate insights across activities, and to drive cross-sharing of resources, insights, and ideas in the best interest of the organization as a whole.

Informal communication on progress is not enough. Neither are occasional one-on-one chats.  It is important that those in charge of the function or initiative need to be asked to prepare to brief others on their efforts in a scheduled forum where the activity or initiative is the only agenda. Even better is when others from across and outside the organization with a stake in performance or with relevant past experience and knowledge are also in attendance.

Review Agenda

  • what we said we’d do
  • what we did
  • what happened
  • what we learned

  • what we plan to do next

Leaders set the tone for reviews to ensure that they serve their intended purpose (see: Review POAD) and that they are not done just for the sake of it and to be sure they do not become a “show and tell” exercise.  Reviewers must make it safe for those whose work is being discussed to embrace the process and seek input from participants because what is being reviewed is what the organization does and deserves input from the best the organization as to offer.

Leaders ask questions to:

  • Draw out clarity
  • Give advice

A review is an efficient and smart way for leaders to keep close to what is really going on and to increase the odds that important work gets done well.  Reviewers must not look to find fault or assign blame.  Instead, they strive to understand what is really going on and to find the best way to improve performance and learn the most.

Reviews also:

  • Provide visibility for key staff.
  • Create high-stakes circumstances that push up performance.
  • Create a forum for executives to model the behavior they want others to emulate.
  • Reveal important lessons and insights to share with other teams and initiatives.

Reviews are successful when:

  • The Project Manager (PM) and the project team feel:
    • They have successfully stepped back from the press of the usual day-to-day to pull together what they are doing into a consolidated whole and shared it with a team of supportive professionals who themselves have reviewed advance materials, showed up, paid attention, participated, and supported the team by challenging its thinking, offering the best advice, and providing access to resources that can be helpful (such as written materials, outside experts, training, and time that will help improve performance).
    • That the preparation process, the review meeting itself, and the follow-up will help them achieve project objectives better, faster, and more smoothly.
  • Management is enlightened with respect to what was reviewed; specifically, what is working, what is not, and what needs to be done and learned as a result
  • The organization’s best ideas, thinking, resources, and skills have been brought to bear.
  • Participants feel:
    • Supported, appreciated, enlightened, engaged, heard, and respected.
    • Appropriate next steps have been lined up in the face of the realities and understanding reached.
  • The PM understands and internalizes:
    • The group’s best thinking in terms of what can be done to most improve performance and/or lower risk and is committed to making that happen
    • The top few actions necessary to follow through
    • What others will specifically do to support these efforts.
    • An open discussion of status leads to the fertilization of ideas across the organization.
  • Top leaders collaborate in support of the PM on front-line work.
  • The work is completed successfully or it is going so well that reviews are no longer needed to ensure success!

Related Posts

8 Reasons Why Reviews Under-perform

Notes and Tips on how to Run a Great Meeting.

Meeting Record

Editor’s note: Updated for 2020, originally posted March 2012.

Manage to Lead

Introducing Manage to Lead: Seven Truths to Help You Change the World as an interactive digital workbook.

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Many intelliven.com blog posts are based on the slides and lecture notes from a masters class in Organization Development called Organization Analysis and Strategy offered at American University and taught by Peter DiGiammarino.  These posts and other material from class, including:

  • Work problems,
  • Templates,
  • Graphics,
  • Slide shows, and
  • Assessments

are available  from Amazon as a softcover workbook or from iTunes as an iBook titled Manage to Lead: Seven Truths to Help You Change the World.

Selected intelliven.com blog content is now available as a workbook from Amazon or as an iBook from iTunes.

Whether one wants to change personal habits, implement a new information system, improve a business process, get team members to work together, increase a community’s appreciation for diversity, or even to topple a monarchy, taking seven actions driven by seven disarmingly simple truths will individually and collectively help achieve the goal.

Manage to Lead presents a framework to describe and assess any organization. It also provides a structured approach to plan and implement next steps for an organization as it strives for long-term growth and performance.

Readers are invited to select a familiar organization on which to apply the tools and templates introduced throughout the workbook. Exercises in each chapter produce essential elements for the organization’s annual strategic plan and lay the groundwork for implementing that plan.

Readers can package the key elements from Organization Exercises to form a strategic plan that communicates how the organization sees itself and where it is headed. At the end of the year leaders can compare actual results with what was described in the strategic plan to study what happened, why what happened was different than plan, what is to be learned from that, and what to do differently going forward as a result.

Repeat the process over several years and compare actual to planned results year-to-year to see the organization mature, perform, and grow to its full potential.

Do & Review, Executive Reviews

Eight Reasons Executive Review Meetings Underperform

The main reason things go wrong  is lack of management attention. Hence the importance of Executive Review Meetings! However, management reviews can also go wrong.  Here are eight common reasons why they often do:

# 8. The leaders did not prepare, so the meeting becomes the preparation and the review never materializes.

# 7. Too much time spent on history, story telling, and showboating. It is up to the leaders to be sure that whatever is really important gets covered.

# 6. The leaders talk right up to the end of the meeting and never created a space for the reviewers to ask questions, clarify, challenge, and then offer their best thinking.

# 5. Top management fails to create a safe environment thus turning the review into a sham (a.k.a. dog-and-pony show).

# 4. Management fails to really pay attention to see what needs to be seen and to deal with what needs to be dealt with rather than seeing what they want or hope to see.

# 3. Management fails to generalize what is learned to incorporate and reuse elsewhere

# 2. Management discovers during the review that things are in much worse shape than expected and, without intention, makes the management team feel inept by piling on and trying to help too much in the moment.

# 1. The number one reason why these meetings don’t go well is that the most important reviewers fail to show up due to last minute crises or they show up physically but not mentally.