Developing management buy-in

Engaging management in the programme from the outset

Like it or not, line management are a crucial factor in the speed of adoption of any system. The practical reality is: those who have the greatest influence over bonus and promotion prospects of people tend to have the greatest influence in the priorities and focus of those people. As such, they can either bring that influence and focus to bear on ensuring progress on the steps to bring about Meeting Effectiveness, or they can use it to keep people busy on other things – and which they choose to do will be a function of what they believe to be most important to the business and their own position and career prospects.

For that reason, it is vitally important that line management, from the top to the bottom:

Appreciate why Meeting Effectiveness is important to their current goals and business success
Are confident that the proposed approach will bring about success
Feel comfortable in the steps they need to take to drive Meeting Effectivenessforward
Believe that this will be the focus of their boss also

Any gaps in these four perspectives will inevitably undermine management commitment to progress, and thereby undermine progress itself. The following sections explain the role of the steering team in ensuring the above is fully in place, and provide some resources to help them to achieve this.

Explain the programme and its purpose

Ensure management understand ‘Why’

To date, we have found that the biggest obstacle to progress is where people do not properly understand why they are installing the tool, and this often ties back to the fact that their line manager is not really clear on ‘why’ either.

People are used to initiatives that come and go, and their strategy is usually to ignore them until they either fade away, or until they become important. The problem is that ignoring them introduces a delay, and so we need to ensure that people understand this is important from the outset. And we do that by getting management talking about it, and by a brisk timetable.

But for management to talk about it, they have to understand it, and they have to be able to easily communicate that understanding. In other words, whatever we use to communicate the importance and the urgency to management, they need to be able to (and to want to) use to communicate it on.

To assist this process, we have developed a set of slides which can be cascaded through the organisation. However, these are necessarily generic, and we strongly recommend that the steering team customise them and make them more specific to their organisation and the challenges currently facing it.

We recommend that the slides are adapted, and then used with the senior management team (in conjunction with the activity below), to create a pack that will then get cascaded by them through their own management structure.

Identify local target benefits

Tie it into something that is immediately understood as a priority

Improvement initiatives are intended to make achievement of day-to-day priorities easier and more effective. However, where that connection is largely theoretical, people see improvement and business-as-usual as two different things, and they struggle to find space for the former because inefficiency in the latter causes it to take up so much of their time.

Why don’t we have time to improve meetings? Because we are so busy in (or as a result of) meetings!

But better meetings is not something people can really relate to. Greater productivity; more time; better innovation; increased customer or employee satisfaction … they are things that people can relate to.

For Meeting Effectiveness to really catch hold, the powerful links it has to achieving the current business priorities (perhaps via the examples above) need to be obvious to people. Management need to be able to explain Meeting Effectiveness in terms of a clear agenda to deliver what people already understand to be important – but to do that, management first need to identify those links for themselves.

To achieve this we recommend that the steering group lead the senior management team in an exercise to develop clear targets to be delivered through meeting effectiveness. And those clear targets need to be material to the businesses current priorities – so much so, that Meeting Ineffectiveness is no longer an option. We have prepared an exercise brief to support this.

Agree implementation responsibilities

Ensure management understand how the tool can help them manage implementation.

Following the above two steps will do much to raise management’s enthusiasm for the programme, and enable them to cascade that enthusiasm to their staff. The outcome of this will be that it is more likely that people will implement the tools and start using them.

More likely, but far from certain. And if shortfalls in implementation are unaddressed, then the likelihood is that they will spread. Managers therefore need to understand how they:

Can quickly identify where those shortfalls lie
Use this information to ensure the shortfalls are addressed

The Inspirometer provides a very helpful and easy to understand traffic light (RAG) system to deliver this information directly to the individuals and the managers so that they can quickly identify and address issues. More about this system can be read in Understanding Implementation Status

The ability to see the user table broken down into teams and departments, and to see the pie charts for these helps more senior managers to focus on the progress of their management team in driving implementation, and this addresses the fourth item in the introduction – that they ‘Believe that this will be the focus of their boss also’