At the start of my career, I loved being invited to meetings.
Being asked to attend made me feel important, new to the company, young professional and all. It meant I was included, trusted and became part of how decisions were made in the company.
At the same time, I would cancel a meeting whenever I had the opportunity, especially a regularly recurring one. We were all busy and I had plenty of other things to do; skipping one meeting rarely seemed like it would cause a problem.
I understood the stated purpose of the meeting, but I did not yet appreciate the consistency it created.
That was probably my relationship with meetings for the first five years of my professional career.
The next phase was almost the exact opposite.
Instead of feeling important when I was invited to a meeting, I became convinced that nearly all meetings were a waste of time. I sat through endless updates, unnecessary commentary and conversations where everyone talked but very few decisions were actually made.
I regularly thought, “This should have been an email.”
To be fair, some of those meetings probably could have been emails or covered around the watercooler. I saw meeting without a clear purpose, useful conversation or decisions can waste an enormous amount of time.
However, I began treating the weaknesses of bad meetings as evidence that meetings themselves were bad. I still didn’t fully understand the role that a good meeting could play in creating consistency and accountability.
The third phase came when I learned what a good meeting looked like and began running them as a business leader.
A good meeting did not need to be long or complicated. It is used to bring together the right people, review the right information, create honest conversation and result in decisions, needing more information and clear next steps.
When accountability, conversation and decision-making were combined, meetings stopped feeling like interruptions to the work. They became some of the most important work I did.
I also began to notice that I made different decisions during the week when I knew I would be reporting on my KPI’s at 3:00 on Tuesday.
That reporting deadline affected how I prioritized my work. It made me check the numbers, follow up on commitments and address problems before I had to explain why nothing had change and my employees responded in much the same way.
When people know a number will be reviewed at a predictable time, they pay more attention to it. They are more likely to know where they stand, recognize when they are falling behind and ask for help while there is still time to improve the result.
What gets monitored gets measured, and what gets measured receives attention.
Over time, the things that consistently receive leadership attention are understood by the organization to be important. The things that are announced once and rarely discussed again are usually overtaken by the urgency of daily work.
This is why choosing the right KPI’s is one of the most important decisions a business can make. Not every number deserves a place on a dashboard. A company can easily measure dozens of things that look impressive without learning anything useful about the health of the business.
The better question is not simply, “What can we measure?”
It is, “What information will help us recognize a problem, make a decision or change an outcome?” or “What data do I need to be looking at to see a trend and course correct it, before running off a cliff”
Some of the KPIs I reported earlier in my career were good. Some were adequate, and with the benefit of hindsight—and the coaching perspective I have today—some were simply the wrong measurements.
A consistent meeting cannot make a poor KPI useful. However, the right KPI reviewed through a consistent leadership rhythm can have a powerful effect on behavior and results.
At the first manufacturing plant where I worked, one department was experiencing discrepant material and scrap costs of approximately 2% of its material cost.
Two percent may not sound significant at first. In a manufacturing environment moving a large volume of parts and materials, however, small percentages can add up quickly.
My manager and I made a change, to review discrepant materials daily instead of weekly, and over time, the department reduced its scrap rate from approximately 2% to less than 0.02%.
To put that into everyday terms, imagine spending $100 at the grocery store and using $99.98 of what you purchased. Only two cents would go to waste.
The improvement did not happen because of one speech, one improvement event or one especially productive week. It happened because leadership created a consistent rhythm for reviewing the issue, understanding what had happened and responding to it.
There is much more to the story of how we accomplished that result. Ask me sometime, and I would be happy to tell you how we did it.
Inconsistent leaders often create inconsistent accountability. – A goal may be introduced and then ignored for several weeks. A problem may receive no attention until it becomes an emergency, or an employee may miss the same expectation repeatedly before the leader finally reacts out of frustration.
A consistent leadership rhythm makes accountability more predictable.
Employees know which results matter, when those results will be reviewed and what they will be expected to explain. They also know they will have a regular opportunity to raise concerns, ask for help and provide context around the numbers.
The number should begin the conversation rather than end it.
A missed KPI could indicate weak performance, but it could also reveal a training problem, an unrealistic goal, a broken process, a market shift or a lack of resources. The meeting creates a place to understand the difference and decide what should happen next.
Leadership consistency is not about having more meetings.
It is about creating a dependable rhythm for reviewing the parts of the business that matter most.
That rhythm may include a weekly leadership meeting, a dashboard with written commentary, a daily team huddle or a monthly financial review. The format matters less than whether the right information is reviewed consistently and whether the conversation leads to appropriate action.
Your team learns what matters by observing what you repeatedly ask about.
When you consistently review sales activity, people pay closer attention to the pipeline. When you review on-time delivery, schedules receive more attention, and when you discuss gross margin instead of revenue alone, employees begin thinking differently about which work is actually valuable.
A recurring meeting is not automatically productive, and canceling one meeting will not destroy the company. However, when leaders repeatedly cancel the conversations that create clarity, measurement and accountability, they should not be surprised when the team begins treating the goals connected to those conversations as optional.
Consistency starts at the top because the leader creates the rhythm.