Peak Business Navigation is based in Madison, WI, serving clients in Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois and Indiana.
One of the easiest ways to boost communication on your team is a 5 minute daily meeting. This is regardless of size of organization, department or level of organization. Often called a daily standup, it’s a quick way to set priorities, celebrate wins and identify areas for improvement.
It really takes a few simple things, but when done consistently helps achieve tremendous clarity and improvement.
White board
White board can be an actual white board, a board with sticky notes, a screen with an Excel spreadsheet, a view of scheduling software or a BI dashboard. The point is to include a few simple things on it:
- What were we trying to accomplish yesterday? (in list or numbers)
- What are we trying to accomplish today? (in list or numbers)
- What’s our metric for the week or month?
5 minutes
The point is that this is quick. Get your team committed to showing up, start on time and keep the balance between encouraging bringing challenges up and trying to solve them right then and there.
Good questions
A few good questions will get the conversation going?
How did yesterday go?
(If things went well) What did we do well to hit our plan? This is also a chance to acknowledge people that went above and beyond.
(If things did not go well) What unexpected challenges did we hit? Were we set up for success? Ideas on how to do better?
It’s critical here to encourage people to speak up, and then if a topic requiring attention comes up that we (1) acknowledge it needs addressing and (2) decide who will follow up, how and by when. Don’t try to have a 30 minute problem solving session right there and then with everyone.
Next question – are we set up for success for our plan today?
(If not) Assign responsibilities to address shortcomings right there or immediately following the meeting.
(If yes) Great! And be sure to reference that tomorrow if things don’t go according to plan – “what unexpected challenges did we hit?”
Final note – acknowledge the weekly or monthly metric. Doesn’t need a lot of time, but especially if the team is doing well, this is the opportunity to applaud the team’s effort month to date at the end of the meeting.
Things to not do:
- Don’t go line by line over a schedule – that should be visible for everyone to see otherwise.
- Do all the talking yourself – remember to ask good questions and engage your team.
- Try to solve all the problems right there – make a plan to work on it, and report back the next day.
Finance and accounting professionals (commonly known as Bean Counters) come in a variety of skill sets and interests. For the sales and operations people, Bean Counters all fall in one big bucket. Therefore, the usual small business owner wonders why their rockstar Accounting Manager doesn’t provide strategic insight to their business’s future.
Some Bean Counters are really well defined and constrained to their group and skill set. Others expand their horizons and migrate to new areas over time, possibly becoming a little bit of all four eventually.
No one skill set is more or less important than the others.
For a high functioning organization, all four areas are ideal. However, for a $25MM revenue business, affording experts in all areas full time is usually not the best use of company budgets.
Naturally, most businesses start off with a transaction processing champion – someone to do the customer billing, pay the vendor bills and find a way to get it all done as quickly as possible.
Fractional CFO services from Peak Business Navigation can fill in the other three boxes at a fraction of the cost of full-time employees. Furthermore, having people with years of experience on your team can help guide your valued people to broaden their skill sets and approaches to become the best version of themselves. Let the Fractional CFO experts at Peak bring out the very best in your team!