The Better Leadership Team Show
The Better Leadership Team Show
How to have the RIGHT discussions with your leadership team
In this episode, I walk you through one of the most powerful tools I use with clients: the Pulse Check. If you're tired of meetings that go nowhere or feel like your leadership team is dodging the tough conversations, this episode is for you. I’ll share the exact questions I ask, how to surface real issues, and how to turn scattered thoughts into focused action. If you want a great company, you need a great leadership team, and that starts with having the right discussions.
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The more a leadership team has the difficult discussions, the important discussions, the more comfortable and skilled that team is gonna get in having those discussions and, making the tough decisions. And, and by the way, that that's not gonna happen in weekly status meetings. When everybody's just talking about what they did, and we only have 45 minutes, so we can't dig deeper into an issue. You made it to the better leadership team show, the place where you learn how to surround yourself with the right people, doing the right things. So you can grow your business without losing your mind. I'm your host and leadership team coach, Mike Goldman. I'm going to show you how to improve top and bottom line growth, fulfillment, and the value your company adds to the world by building a better leadership team. All right, let's go. Leadership teams need to set the direction and priorities for the entire organization, and that means leadership teams need to have the right conversations. It means they need to discuss what really matters, not just go through the motion of status meeting after status meeting. And if the discussions don't happen, if the right discussions don't happen as a team, they tend to happen in the meeting. After the meeting when two or three people get together and say, could you believe we didn't talk about X? Could you believe what's going on here? You know, I don't believe we've got the right strategy. Why aren't we talking more about operations? and when those meetings happen without all parties involved, when those meetings happen in the meeting, after the meeting, you're not gonna come to the right conclusions.'cause the right people aren't involved. You are also not building trust. You are hurting trust because in that meeting, after the meeting, you are showing a misalignment across the leadership team. The more a leadership team has the difficult discussions, the important discussions, the more comfortable and skilled that team is gonna get in having those discussions and making the tough decisions. So the more you have these tough discussions, the better you're gonna get at these tough discussions. And, and by the way, that's not gonna happen in weekly status meetings. When everybody's just talking about what they did, and we only have 45 minutes, so we can't dig deeper into an issue. These are conversations that can't be rushed, so they tend to happen in meetings like annual planning retreats, which for my clients are two day sessions, quarterly planning meetings, which may be one or two day sessions, monthly check-in meetings, which are typically. Two to four hours, you know, or certainly ad hoc meetings for the sole purpose of discussion discussing an issue. So you've gotta have the right. mediums the right types of meetings to discuss these issues as a team. But in addition to that, I'm gonna give you one really important technique that I use with my clients that makes sure you're not just going through the motions, and it's called a pulse check when I do my quarterly planning sessions and my annual planning sessions with my clients, and you can do this in your monthly meetings as well. But when I do these meetings, I always start with good news, but then right after going around and getting some good news and getting started on a positive path with, with a right, positive opportunistic focus, we move into what I call pulse check questions. Pulse check questions are typically two to four questions that get to the heart of. How folks around the table are feeling, where folks see issues, where they see opportunities, where, where we need to have the difficult discussions, what we need to have difficult and deep discussions about. And, and when I do the pulse check, and in a minute I'll share a whole bunch of potential pulse check questions with you. The way I do it is I don't simply ask a question and then spark discussion. Around the room. There's two problems with that. One is you might wind up spending a lot of time and going deep on a whole bunch of things that don't matter very much. The other thing is when you just ask a question and let the group discuss, the folks that tend to talk a lot are gonna talk a lot. The folks that tend to sit in the background are gonna sit in the background and you're not gonna get. Everyone's thoughts, you're not gonna identify all of the different ideas and topics for discussion that you really need. So I'm a big user, and if you. or a listener of this, podcast for more than a few episodes, I probably talk about how I use flip charts and, and post-it notes. So for each of these two to four pulse check questions, people write their answers on a post-it note, put it up on a flip chart. So we've got everybody's thinking and everybody's equal. Up on that flip chart. Now the two to four questions I use are not always the same. I vary those questions. I may come back to the same questions from time to time, but I vary the questions. So what I wanna do is actually wanna take you through 26, and I know that sounds a lot. But an inventory of 26 potential pulse check questions. Don't use them all in a meeting please. like I said, I typically use two to four, but this is an inventory of 26 pulse check questions that you can. Choose from. So if you are driving your car, uh, you know, come back to this at a later time when you have time to kind of pause and take some notes. But let me tell you what these 26 are and then I'll tell you how we discuss them. So the first one, this first one is one I use almost every time I get together with the team, the rest of them vary, but the first one very simply says, how are you feeling about the company? At this time, and certainly you are, you are hoping and you are working towards by building trust in the room. You are, are hoping and working towards getting honest and sometimes brutally honest answers to that question. That's literally just taking the pulse of how everybody's feeling. That's question number one. Question number two, what do you believe is the number one issue facing the company at this time? Number three, what issues do we see recurring with our employees? Number four, what issues do we see recurring with our customers or clients? Number five, what other issues must be addressed today? Normally, that will be the last question and I actually allow people to answer with, with more than one. Item if they've got any or, or answer with nothing if they think, uh, everything else has been covered. Number six, what one conversation do we need to have that we are afraid to have? Number seven, the concerns I have about this group and or our tasks are dot dot dot. What should we be most proud of as a team? That was number eight. Number nine, what should we be most proud of as a company? Number 10, what exciting new opportunity is on the horizon? Number 11, what should we stop doing? Number 12, what should we start doing? Number 13, what are our competitors doing that we need to discuss? Number 14. What's the most important thing we need to improve upon as a leadership team? Number 15. The ideal outcome for this meeting is dot dot dot. Number 16. What would you tackle next if you knew you couldn't fail? Number 17, what's the one thing that will change the game entirely for you? What's the one thing that would change the game entirely, For the company? It's both within Question number 17. Number 18, what do you need to tackle currently that scares you? Number 19. If you can change one thing about our current strategy, what would it be? Number 20, what opportunity do we need to move faster on? Number 21, what did you fail to accomplish this quarter that you should have? Number 22. What is your biggest current business problem you are trying to work through or solve? Number 23. Looking back over the quarter, what should we have done differently? Number 24, what's the biggest barrier to the company moving forward right now? Number 25. What's something we ought to be thinking and talking more about? And number 26, what's the number one concern you have with the leadership team? Now that's a great inventory of 26 questions, but you could probably come up with 50 more. So don't stick to these questions. they're meant as a great starting point, I hope a great starting point for you. And again, you're going to use two, three, or four in a monthly meeting, quarterly meeting, annual meeting, or some other ad hoc meeting where you have more than 45 minutes or an hour. To discuss. Now, let's talk about how to discuss, because when you do that, if you've got a leadership team of 5, 6, 7, 8 people, you are gonna wind up by asking, let's say three questions. You are gonna have a whole bunch of post-it notes up there, 15, 20, 25, whatever it is, post-it notes up there, and if you dig deep. Into every single one. Half the day goes by and you will probably have spent a lot of time on items that just aren't that important to talk about. So what we wanna do is, and, and what I do with my clients is I set ground rules when we have these discussions. and you know, I say we're gonna, we're gonna read through each one of these. And, and one of the things I do, by the way that's important is group like items together. Because if you've got three questions times five people, you're probably not gonna have 15 post-it notes to discuss. there are probably really only eight or nine real ideas there when you group like items together. So that's the first step. Once we do that, I tell the group we're gonna read through each one of these. We're gonna talk about it enough just to understand. What it says. Now that discussion may last 30 seconds, or it could last five or seven minutes. Hopefully more like a couple minutes we're gonna read through to understand it and then before we just dive deep and try to solve a problem or, or figure out how to go after an opportunity, we're gonna figure out, after understanding it, we're gonna figure out what we're gonna do with it. And there are really a few different options. When you read through one of those Post-It notes that says something like, you know, our clients are, you know, angry that we're not delivering product on time, I give the group a few different options. Number one. Is this something that needs quick action? In other words, I'm asking, is this something where it could be, you know, Susan is going to take, you know, do X on this by Tuesday, and we take what I call a who, what, when, who's accountable, what are they doing, when are they getting it done by? That's typically, if there's a quicker tactical answer to the problem, the second thing we can do, and, and both of these are different. Levels of action. The second thing we can do is say, Hey, that's a great idea for a potential quarterly priority or what I call a a quarterly rock. And for those things that aren't, Hey, Joe's gonna get it done by Tuesday. The things that are a little bit more strategic, a little bit more meaty, it's like, Hey, we're gonna take action on that. But that might be a quarterly priority. That may be a quarterly rock. So number one thing we can do is we could take action either A, who, what, when, tactical action, or a bigger meteor rock. Number two after action is we could say, well, we're not even sure what action we would take because we need to discuss this. We need to figure out how we're gonna respond or if we need to respond. And if that's the case, we'll put it on the issues list. So first option is action and which kind of action we're gonna take. Second option is, this is really important, but we've gotta discuss it. Let's put it on the issues list. And then the third option is No action. No action either means whatever is written on that post-it is not important enough to take action on. More likely. What it means is, hey, that is an issue, but we're already dealing with it. It's not gonna be helpful for us to spend more time on it here. So it's either an action, two types of actions, it goes on the issues list, or it's a no action. Yeah. Now then we're gonna go at some point in the meeting, maybe right after the pulse check, maybe sometime later in the meeting, depending on your agenda for the meeting. We're gonna come back to that issues list. And by the way, if it's, if you're in an annual planning meeting or a quarterly planning meeting or a monthly check-in, you are also gonna go back to those potential. Uh, priorities, those potential rocks. Figure out what we do with those. But what I wanna focus in on here is those discussion items.'cause remember, the whole point of this podcast is, is having better discussions, having the right discussions. So now let's imagine you have got six or eight items to discuss up on the issues list. And let's imagine you've only got an hour. To have that discussion. You are probably not going to get to six or eight, and it's probably okay because the six or eight are probably not of equal importance. So the first thing we need to do is prioritize, which are the one or two or three, depending on how much time we have, which are the ones we absolutely need to discuss today, and which are the ones that are gonna stay on our issues list until we have. More time. So number one, we're gonna prioritize it.'cause you may not get, you probably won't get to all issues. In fact, you'll probably have an ongoing, almost never ending issues list to pull from. If you are having the right discussions and thinking about the business, I'm not sure you'll ever get to the point where you say, we have nothing left to talk about. We have no issues. For those issues, you select what I like to do as opposed to just taking whatever issue came out that may be a statement like, you know, we need to improve communication between the customer service team and the operations team. Or we need to, figure out how to, you know, get better at. Closing more sales opportunities with prospects, whatever it is. I like to turn that issue into a question. So rather than saying, you know, we need to, you know, do a better job of communicating between customer service and operations. I'm gonna wanna get more specific and phrase it as a question. That may sound something like, how can we speed communication of customer issues to operations so they could better react to it? That's gonna narrow the focus of our discussion and really focus us on what's most important. And that's it. That's it is for each of those issues. Restate it as a question. And dive in. And, and the last thing I'd say is, you know, when you are about to discuss an issue, it's important to know two things. Number one, who around that leadership table is accountable for the resolution of that issue? It's not always the CEO, it may be the CFO, it may be the CIO, it may be the VP of sales, but who's accountable and what does success in that conversation look like? What I mean by that is are we trying to come to a final decision around the table and success is we align around a final decision, is it, we're just gonna brainstorm a bunch of ideas. The VP of sales wants to hear ideas from everyone, and then she's gonna go back, think about it, and come back to the team with a decision. You know, are we waiting for consensus? I hope not, but how, what? What are you trying to do? What is success in that conversation? Look like. So again, we need to have the most important conversations as a leadership team. So we set the stage, set the priority, uh, in terms of actions for the rest of the organization. To do that, we need to be having the right meetings with the right amount of time. We need to throw the right questions out. At the group, these pulse check questions are an amazing way to have discussions you never would've had before. These discussions that come out of the pulse check are almost always more important than anything I would've had on a standard agenda. And then when you come out with whatever discussion items, whatever issues list you need to talk about, prioritize it, state it in the form of a question, and then who's accountable. And what does success in the discussion look like? I hope that helps you have the right discussions. As a leadership team, as I always say, if you want a great company, you need a great leadership team. I hope I got you a bit closer there today. Talk to you again soon.