Performance vs. Plan: The Art & Science of Review Meetings

“Not another meeting!” Many organizations and their internal teams dread meetings. All too often, they are right to do so. Meetings of all types can easily leave the attendees frustrated, because little gets accomplished, the time gets wasted on arguments over who’s ‘right,’ or no decisions are made. Poorly designed meetings, and meetings simply for the sake of meetings, are rampant in large corporations, small businesses, and nonprofits of all types and sizes. In this program, you will learn how to design a meeting that delivers value to attendees, solves real problems, and improves productivity, morale and employee engagement. If your team members are not engaged, it’s a lot harder to reach organizational goals and objectives. Some of the best practices you will learn include the effective use of key performance indicators, tracking progress against plan, allocating time for strategic conversations, and even the simplicity of the timed agenda. You will also learn the skills of effective facilitation, to avoid internal strife and wasteful arguments.

• The Review Meeting: what it is and how it works
• Establishing Desired Results before the meeting
• Publishing a timed agenda
• Sharing up-to-date metrics or other insights
• Effective meeting facilitation; how to nip “meeting wars” in the bud
• Summarizing meeting accomplishments, assigning new tasks or targets
• Distributing minutes; following up; scheduling next meeting
   

• What meetings are for, or why are we meeting today?
• What is a Review Meeting; how does it differ from Planning Meetings and Huddles
• The role of the facilitator
• The five ways to measure performance
• Establishing Key Performance Indicators and Success Targets
• Gathering performance-vs-plan data before a Review Meeting
• The data; reading the story the numbers tell you
• Selecting improvement initiatives: what to lock in, what to leave alone, what to improve
• Ensuring participant engagement
• Keeping participants engaged during virtual meetings
• Brainstorming and prioritizing skills, and when to use them
• The skills of continuous improvement
• Problem definition and root cause analysis
• Assigning follow-up tasks or teams
• Meeting minutes the easy way
• Accountability measures for follow-up meetings
   

Review Meetings offer a refreshing alternative to the old “what-have-you-done-for-me-lately” approach. Review Meetings are designed to do three things: 

• compare progress to desired results to date; 
• assess which results are desirable and which are undesirable; 
• plan to lock in desirable results and make improvements where they’re not so desirable; and assign people or teams new metrics, deadlines or projects. 

Any meeting convener can master the key points of Review Meetings, as long as they are able to articulate desired results, measure performance against those results, and engage attendees in strategic conversation around them. Meetings must always have a purpose, a timed agenda, and opportunities for discussion and airing of opinions. Whether you’re experienced at holding meetings, or simply attending them, you will learn pertinent methods and practices to improve outcomes, strengthen employee engagement, and turn the meeting experience into a benefit for all concerned. And you might just end up needing fewer meetings too! 
 

Individuals who are likely to benefit from this training include:

• Senior executives and leaders, such as CEOs, CFOs, CMOs, CDOs (nonprofit title for Chief Development Officer), and so on.
• Sales managers, branch managers, customer service managers, marketing managers
• In the nonprofit sector, look for program managers, directors of development, directors of advancement, direct marketing managers, major gift managers..
• Team leaders and front-line supervisors in almost any discipline
• Boards of Directors (nonprofit organizations in particular)
• Project managers, including those with PMI (Project Management Institute) certifications
   

Ellen Bristol is a thought leader in the field of strategic fundraising for nonprofits, B-Corps and social enterprises. She founded Bristol Strategy Group in 1995, and has worked with nonprofit organizations ever since to improve their fundraising results. She developed her firm’s trademarked methodology Fundraising the SMART Way™, and also designed the Leaky Bucket Assessment for Effective Fundraising, the only popular study of fundraising-staff productivity which has been gathering data since 2011. Ellen enjoyed a successful 20-year career as a major-account sales representative for Fortune 50 companies until she founded her firm and discovered a passion for the nonprofit sector. She made it her mission to repurpose the most meaningful and proven disciplines of strategic sales management to the nonprofit sector, creating higher levels of productivity while maintaining the philanthropic heart and charitable soul of nonprofits and NGO’s.