GMT Meetings
The GMT Meetings are held every month, as soon as the previous month’s financial statements are ready. The GMT Meetings are designed to:
- Define your company plans and goals.
- Measure and monitor your plan-versus-actual results.
- Create action steps to ensure goal achievement.
Note that the GMT Meetings are not management-by-committee meetings, staff meetings, or meetings for the head of the organization to “hold court.” These are team meetings that are focused on only six major topics in order to help the team achieve the organization’s goals:
1. Planning.
2. Revenue generation.
3. Productivity.
5. Policies.
6. Strategies and actions to achieve goals.
The GMT Meeting itself is tightly structured, while allowing great freedom of voice. Everyone is encouraged to provide insights and counsel, but each person is accountable for their own area of responsibility.
Every GMT Meeting has an agenda, which addresses only those issues that fall under the six topics and which specifies the time required for each responsible person to address their topic. The agenda is provided to each GMT member 2 to 3 days in advance of the meeting, although last-minute items can be added.
Every meeting involves three roles: a chairperson, a secretary, and a timekeeper. These roles may be permanent or they may be rotated among the members of the GMT.
The Chairperson keeps the meeting on track by focusing everyone’s attention on the agenda and the organization’s goals. The Chair also seeks to move the team closer to achieving its goals by creating Action Steps, which are composed of three parts:
1. A description of the specific action to be taken.
2. The identification of the person responsible.
3. A date for completion.
In fact, the Action Steps from the previous meeting become agenda items for the next meeting. The chairperson directs each meeting to ensure that the action steps due that day have been completed.
The following table on page 185 is a sample agenda. It shows dates for today’s meeting and the two successive meetings, the three people involved in running the meeting, and the action steps for today and the future. It also shows the organization’s goals, which should always be in front of everyone.
The agenda also has space for the goals for today’s meeting. The Chair poses this question at the beginning of each GMT Meeting to ensure that she knows what to do to make this meeting a successful one: “What are your goals for this meeting? If our time together today is successful, what will we accomplish?”
The secretary records all the Action Steps generated in the meeting and provides these to the person who will be the Chair for the next meeting. These new Action Steps will then become a part of the agenda for the meeting next time.
The time keeper tracks the time for each topic and informs the Chair when time is out or nearly so. The Chair then decides if a minimal amount of time should be added to complete the topic or if the topic should be taken off line. The intent here is not to extend the meeting, but rather to make it as efficient as possible in addressing the topics in a timely manner.
“Now we’re ready for a critical topic for the Goal Management Team—the comparison of our company goals to our actual performance. We monitor this for each month and for the year to date.
“This means that we have created a plan for the year on a monthly basis—we have goals for each month. In our company, we have goals for profitability and for our customer survey. Let’s look at the profitability goal as an example of the analysis process.
“In the table on the following page is a simplified version of what each GMT member receives from our financial department. They get this before the GMT Meeting, with the actual numbers filled in, so that they have time to analyze their department results and formulate their action steps before the meeting.
“When we hold our GMT meetings, we first look at the overall company performance, which is represented by this table. You’ll notice that the vertical listing on the left side of the table is really an income statement. Since one of our goals is 8% Net Profit Before Taxes, the income statement presented here is the best way to track our progress for this goal.
“Using the information in this table, we compare our actual performance to our goals for the current month and for the year to date. You can see that we express the actual performance both in dollars and as a percentage. Both of these numbers are very helpful to us.
“If our performance is on plan or ahead of plan, we discuss the reasons. We do this so that we can ensure that we can sustain this level of performance. We want to know what we’re doing right, so that we can keep on doing it.
“If our performance is behind plan, we also discuss the reasons, but only to learn lessons about where we fell short. We don’t spend any real time re-hashing old news. Our focus is much more heavily directed toward the creation of Action Steps to get us back on plan. In fact, we won’t move from this agenda item until we have a ‘plan to get back on plan.’
“This discussion of plan versus actual performance involves each department, the heads of which briefly discuss what they will do to sustain good performance or what Action Steps they will conduct to get back on plan. And each manager is responsible for these numbers—they cannot expect the financial person to present and explain the numbers for their department. This is a key point—each manager is responsible and accountable for the performance of their group and for the actions needed to meet their goals.
“Now, don’t forget that we have another goal in our company. We want to score a minimum 8.5 on a scale of 10 in our customer satisfaction surveys. Our discussions on this goal would be similar to what I’ve just described. We’d compare plan with actual, discuss our successes or shortcomings, and create Action Steps as needed.
“And so the meeting would progress, from topic to topic. Ken would direct the discussions to ensure that each item was completed successfully. If this were not the case, he would ask the responsible person to describe the corrective action they intend to take to get back on plan. This would include a date as well as a specific description.
“Then, Ken asks the question, ‘Did we meet our goals for today? Was our meeting successful?’ Everyone is encouraged to provide an answer to this. If the meeting goals were not met (which shouldn’t occur if the meeting were well run), Ken should ensure that a specific Action Step be re-addressed or that some Action Step be created to address the issue outside of the meeting, by some specific date.”