What is the Battle (Operating) Rhythm? (#34)
There are only 2,000 work hours in a year. Time and the clock marches on. The most precious commodity for any small or medium sized business is time. But have you evaluated how effectively you are using your company’s time?
US Army units spend a lot of time optimizing their battle rhythm, which is defined as the “deliberate daily cycle of command, staff, and unit activities intended to synchronize current and future operations.” When I was in Afghanistan the battalion I led had a morning virtual update meeting six days a week, a targeting meeting every other week, a commanders face-to-face meeting once a quarter, and a variety of reports due daily and weekly. The picture below is a depiction of the battle rhythm. This cycle enabled me to create shared understanding between the commanders and staff, allocate scarce resources, focus efforts, and make critical decisions. We felt that our battle rhythm gave the battalion the ability to operate more rapidly than the competition (the Taliban), maintain pressure, synchronize our actions, and keep our competitive advantage.
Now most small and medium businesses don’t have a battle rhythm, but they do have an operating rhythm. It is worthwhile for companies to spend time evaluating their cadence of reports, meetings, and off-sites to make sure that they are effective and are driving the organization to its objectives. Have too many meetings and individual members of the team will struggle to do the work. Have too few meetings and you risk losing momentum and alignment. Just the right amount will enable your company to operate at a more rapid rate than your competition and gain or keep your competitive advantage.
As an exercise to evaluate your company’s operating rhythm, first go back and revisit your company’s mission+leader’s intent (see post #25 for more on mission+leader’s intent) Then, open up a spreadsheet or use a whiteboard and create columns for weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual meetings; then start listing the name of the meeting, the attendees, the purpose of the meeting, and any outcomes from the meeting. Once you’ve reviewed six months of meetings you will have a pretty good understanding of your company’s operating rhythm.
After you have tracked all your company’s meetings then you need to evaluate your meetings in respect to your leader’s intent. Is each meeting helping us achieve our purpose? Is each meeting helping us achieve our end state (what success looks like at a certain date in the future)?
Keep the meetings that help drive the organization forward, discard those that don’t, and add new ones, if necessary. As you design your new operating rhythm, a general rule of thumb for corporate meetings purpose and length:
Annual meetings: Set targets and strategy (1-2 days)
Quarterly meetings: Review results and adjust the strategy (.5 - 1 day)
Quarterly team building meetings: Build the team (2-3 hours)
Monthly meetings: Check and correct deviations (2–3 hours)
Weekly meetings: Track and monitor execution (1 hour)
One-on-one meetings: Communicate from supervisor to employee and from employee to supervisor (30 minutes)
Daily meetings: Inform and align the team (15 minutes)
Then the final step is to publish the new operating rhythm to your team. The team needs to understand the cadence and the purpose of the meetings. In addition, your team will help keep you accountable going forward.
In today’s environment you may need to create two operating rhythms: one for remote work and one for working from the office. Just transferring the office operating rhythm typically does not optimize your effectiveness. New meetings need to be added, like a daily check-in or a social get together to build your team’s bonds. Ineffective ones could be discarded.
Your new operating rhythm will give you business a competitive advantage, ensure you are executing your strategy, and eliminate ineffective meetings.
Conclusion
Spending time refining your battle rhythm is incredibly powerful. If you’d like some help from TFCG jump starting this process in your business, hit one of the buttons below to see if we can help your team:
In the meantime, go on the offensive and use these ideas on battle rhythm to improve your organization’s battle rhythm.