I'm going to give you two little hacks here for governance, which has become a huge obsession of mine in business.
If you ever hear me speak about business, you will not be able to avoid me speaking about governance.
So, this is to do with your meeting schedule (the ultimate test of governance). How people report in and feed in, and what happens.
The first is a work-related meeting schedule; this is the senior leadership team.
What happens in the senior leadership team is that you put your senior people in a team (the secrets in the name), and then you schedule the meetings. We scheduled 4 quarterly SLT meetings, which are all afternoon meetings, and which are set in a meeting room with coffee and biscuits and everybody present with the papers that they provide (more about that later).
The next part of this is the 6 weekly SLT meetings, which happen, believe it or not, on the 6 weeklies in between the 3 monthlies. These are much shorter, 2 hours, designed to see that everyone's on track and to remove obstacles for everybody who needs obstacles removing, to make sure that we all hit our objectives and our targets and what we want to do before the next quarter (the quarter meeting is the law).
The final one on SLT is the 3-weekly, and yes, you guessed it, it's on the 3-weeklies in between the 6-weekly in between the 3 monthly.
The 3-weeklies are very informal; they last 1 hour, and we sit down and just make sure everyone's OK, we have no significant problems and no difficulties.
We meet at the quarter meetings, and we report at the 6-weekly meetings.
We report in the 6-weekly meetings now using a format called ROA: results, objectives and actions. The thing that's important is the actions: “What are we all going to do next before the 12-weekly meeting?”
What this does is it creates accountability and keeps us on track but also allows everybody in the SLT to know what everybody else is up to and what's going on in the business.
If you're really clever, you can invite somebody onto your SLT as a non-exec director (if they'll come); we have an extraordinary non-exec director who runs a business that turns over 150 million pounds a year.
They hold us to account quite considerably, and it's made us better as a business.
We report to the 3-monthly meetings using standard SLT reports for all the domains that we work in; these include the following:
Number 1, managing director's report,
Number 2, finance director's report,
Number 3, marketing director's report,
Number 4, academy director's report,
Number 5, human resources director's report,
Number 6, operations director's report,
Number 7, IT director's report,
Number 8, business development director's report,
And Number 9, chairman's summary of the business strategically and overall.
We have the minutes from the previous meeting, which have the action points that we discussed and any other papers that are submitted.
All papers are read before the meeting; we don't read papers at the meeting.
It's not really hard to do this; you just have to have intent.
Here's a tip.
If you decide to set this system up (and I promise that you should), expect your business will double in 5 years, but also set the first quarter meeting and get everyone together and use that meeting to explain to everyone the structure of the meetings, to decide upon the structure of your reports, the frequency, and how this will work, your action points, your results, objectives, and that action system, and then go target your next 12-week meeting with a 6 week in between and 2 or 3 weeks and see what happens.
It's boring, but it's devastatingly effective.