One Minute Pause No 9

A few years ago the management at Toyota had a problem.

They found that every week, an entire Tuesday afternoon, from 12:30pm - 6:30pm was tied up in the weekly management meeting.

The problem wasn’t that the meetings lacked value - they did give everyone an insight into how the manufacturer was operating, and some obstacles were overcome.

The problem however was the time taken. There were 12 managers, and it took 25-30 mins each to deliver their update.

In fact that’s an average time and not completely right. Some managers were delivering their updates in 10 minutes, and some were taking 45 minutes.

Long, indulgent and (shudder) often boring presentations from some people. Short, tighter and more considered presentations from others.

You can sense the frustration in the room: the weekly management update meeting was clearly not a highlight of everyone’s week.

Luckily, we were able to help them with the one thing that they needed to get rid of the pain.

Some structure.

We gave each of the managers a simple template to keep them on track, and gave them all some personal coaching about using it.

The template did its job, acting as a roadmap to ensure each manager kept to the main points.

Each manager was able to distil down to just the key issues, and presentations suddenly got a lot more interesting.

Furthermore, we imposed a time guideline.

We suggested that each presentation should go no longer than 3 mins, with another 5 mins for discussion at the end - if needed.

If anyone had further points that didn’t concern anyone but them, then they held off until a more convenient time.

There was some resistance at first - especially from the more verbose members of the group.

But soon enough they realised the benefits of getting through it and getting back to a good afternoon’s work.

Now the average Toyota management meeting takes less than 90 minutes.

One week they told me that it was over in under an hour.

Best of all, they felt that there more information was covered, with less emotion, conflict and detail, because people were putting some thought into preparing using the template.

Do you have similar meeting issues? Is the Toyota story one that you could potentially float towards your team?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 12th, 2005 at 1:44 pm and is filed under One Minute Pause. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.