A Smart Calendar Plan Helps You Deliver on Strategy and Run Your Business

Get the right people at the table at the right time

Focusing too much on running your growing business and too little on planning its future risks stunting the company’s potential for growth. As Ichak Adizes would say, it’s all go-go all the time! Yet, without a commitment to long-term planning such businesses won’t mature into healthy adolescence. That’s why the startup leader’s first charge is to organize the company to get the right people in place to run the business and provide strategic leadership.

Once they’ve accomplished this, the leader must get these individuals working together as a highly functioning team. And this, of course, involves communication and meetings. One of the most helpful books I’ve read on meetings is called Death by Meeting, written by Patrick Lencioni, founder of The Table Group. Contrary to its title, the book actually calls for replacing routine, boring and unproductive meetings with interactive and energetic gatherings — and having more of them!

The truth is, as social beings we need to communicate and to look each other in the eye. As a CEO, I think it’s my job to provide vision, inspire towards it, align the different parts of the organization, and finally coach the team toward that vision. And I can’t do any of that without meetings.

The Table Group’s website contains some easy-to-use tools to help you run effective meetings, so I won’t repeat all of them here. But one of those tools, which Lencioni calls “The Four Meetings,” touches on something near and dear to my own experience: something I call “organizational rhythm.”

Basically, organizational rhythm involves

1. disciplining yourself and your team to be more purposeful about meetings,

2. getting the right decision makers to the right meetings at the right times and

3. using a calendar plan to run the business while planning for the future.

Sound difficult and time-consuming? It’s not, really, and it creates clarity and smoothness, actually reducing the time you need to spend putting out fires.

My Calendar Plan

Let’s look at my annual calendar plan (Figure 1) from my old company to see what I mean. Yes, you should plan your whole year at one time.

As the chart shows, my annual calendar was divided into seven meetings that, taken together, allowed us both to run the company and to build out our strategy during a period of fast growth.

• Executive One-On-One Weekly or Bi-Weekly (not shown): These were roughly 45-minute mentoring conversations with each member of the Executive Team. I used this time to help troubleshoot tactical concerns.
• Executive Team Weekly (forest green): Once a week, the whole Executive Team met for 45 minutes to touch base on purely tactical issues for that week, i.e., review KPIs and keep everybody up to speed on one another’s areas. Topics that were too “big” for this short meeting were prioritized for our monthly meeting. On weeks when we had a monthly meeting scheduled, we canceled the weekly.

Figure 1. Establish an effective rhythm to your meetings by creating an annual calendar plan that separates tactical and strategic conversations.

• Executive Team Monthly (yellow): Monthly meetings were for going deeper on two or three key topics in our current strategy — where we were humming along or needing to adjust on big picture issues. Are shipments keeping pace with sales? Are regulatory snags slowing down new product development? That sort of thing. Each monthly meeting lasted most of one day. We canceled monthly meetings in months when we held retreats.
• Executive Quarterly Retreat (orange): Four times a year, my vice presidents and I met for two days off-site to step back and “lay the tracks” for the following year. Prior to meeting, the VPs did lots of homework to prepare themselves to lead the discussion of strategic planning changes in their areas. Retreats 1–4 focused respectively on 1) drafting a first pass at a comprehensive plan for the next year, 2) projecting revenues, 3) projecting expenses and 4) finalizing the plan. Current, tactical or strategic issues were off limits.
• Leadership Quarterly (blue): The executive team’s success owed a large debt to this meeting, which included them as well as all company directors. The exec team used this full-day meeting to get feedback on strategic planning efforts from those who were much closer to running the business — the directors. Many of our directors mirrored their departments’ schedules on ours to provide the timeliest insights they could as well as to “cascade” appropriate learnings out to their own teams. (Our directors had the benefit of undergoing a year-long leadership training program on key skills/knowledge needed to scale leadership capabilities.)
• Quarterly Town Hall (purple): Four times a year, we held two-hour meetings for the whole company that corresponded with our open book management approach where we would share results with the entire company. The rhythm was
• Jan. (live) — Review previous year results and roll out this year’s strategy,
• April (virtual) — Review previous quarter results and reset on current year plan,
• July (live) — Mid-year review of results and how to finish the year strong. Begin to plant seed on next year’s theme, and
• Oct. (virtual) — Review YTD results and focus the team on how to end the year strong — continue to plant seeds setting up next year’s theme. Include team-building activities for the entire company (another blog on this on the way).
• Quarterly Roundtables (lime green): Due to their size and scope, Town Halls weren’t conducive to lengthy Q&A, so I followed the example of a former mentor and hold quarterly “roundtables” in each department. As I’ve written before, roundtables let me take the pulse of the organization in a less intimidating atmosphere than Town Hall. They also gave me a chance to reinforce, you guessed it, mission, values and strategy.

Note that we added three meetings on to Lencioni’s four-meeting model. We were able to do so precisely because each was razor focused. In the busiest month of the year for me, say April, I spent 27 hours in meetings. That’s a modest 3 ½ out of 22 total workdays.

To make all of this work, the CEO needs to do two things: first, designate somebody, your best scheduler, for example, to make it happen; second, you need to adopt some kind of protocol or house rules for running the meeting. At my old company, we came up with a practice we called “CPR,” which stood for “context, purpose, result.” I’ll show you how that worked in another article.

How does rhythm work at your company?

Robert U. Craven, Findaway Adventures CEO

Enjoy this article? If you would like to see simple, practical tips in your inbox every week sign up for TwoTip Tuesday to help scale your change-the-world business.

PS: All credit to my ghost-writing partner, Dave Moore, who is instrumental in getting my thoughts out in a coherent manner & into these blogs. Thanks Dave!