Once in a while, when I’m reading about leadership best practices, I notice the mention of tools that, at first, sound kind of mundane. For example, a leadership blogger might talk about agendas or scorecards or forms that track special projects, or a grid that gets used for a SWOT analysis. It might be easy to not connect those functional tools with bigger problem solving or diagnostic purposes.

However, recently I started using an L10 agenda because I was working with a team that was extremely disorganized and all over the place in terms of focus. On top of that, meetings always started late, some people didn’t show up, and we had no real sense of what had been decided in the previous meeting – or where any of the related follow-up was.

I really introduced the L10 (which none of them had heard of) more for my own sanity because they were making me crazy.

As we got into a couple of months, I did notice that some expected things happened. The biggest one was that we didn’t lose track of tasks, and we could actually see if something had been on the list for way too long, or if our prioritization of tasks made any sense. The thing I expected was that the tool and the proper execution of the tool would drive some efficiency, some time savings, and some accountability. And I suppose all of that meant it would be better for the organization in the long run. Looking back, I think I was correct and that is what happened ,but something else happened that surprised me.

The tool I had introduced was more than an agenda format driving the agenda itself, or making sure that we showed up on time, or making sure that we ended on time, or making sure that we focused on the highest priority issues.

The discovery was something that I hadn’t expected: the agenda functioned as a diagnostic tool because, over time, I tracked all of the finished tasks and stored them in a secondary document and what emerged in looking at the history and looking every week at the to-do list was that there were certain people accountable for tasks every single week.  But there was one person whose name was never on the to-do list. At first, I thought it didn’t mean much but after four weeks, and then eight weeks, I realized that the agenda format could help me look at a bigger picture and, in this specific instance, it showed that we had a staff member showing up but not really engaged and not really contributing and not being held accountable! That meant that that person was not holding herself accountable and that her boss (who was my client) was also not holding her accountable.

This made me focus on working more consistently and energetically with the people on the team who did own tasks and did have updates to offer and who were engaged. And guess what? A few months into the process the person who had no accountability, and whose name never showed up, and who really didn’t contribute became the naysayer and ended up doing the opposite of contributing. The person who should have been a team contributor was really a team detractor, and that made total sense to me because that person had not been assigned to anything meaningful and had not taken on any meaningful assignments.

When that person was no longer part of the organization a couple of months later it came as no surprise, and I think the business tool that I had implemented — as a team agenda — actually became a pretty good predictor of who was going to stay on the team and who wasn’t.

Dan Keelan founded Lightning Strike Media in 2017. The company offers strategic marketing, custom publishing, and online learning services focused on growing organizations and entrepreneurs.

To find out more, contact Dan Keelan.

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