Two steps ahead, in step
Breakthrough Commerce · Edition 053
This week the JH leadership team spent three days away from the day job, working through our toughest problems and our biggest opportunities. Not a sprint review, not a slide deck rehearsal. The kind of room where nobody can hide behind a status update.
A good chunk of it was about people. Not headcount plans, the actual question underneath them: how do we keep rewarding and enriching people who are already this good? Every leader in that room had said some version of the same thing before we’d even opened a laptop.
We want to be two steps ahead. It’s the whole point of the job. You don’t work at JH to sit back and be average. You work here to be fantastic.
Most teams would say that out loud at an offsite and everyone nods. Try to prove it back at your desk on Monday and most teams go quiet, because “two steps ahead” describes movement, and movement only counts if the whole company moves with you. A leadership team that’s two steps ahead of a business that’s standing still isn’t ahead of anything. It’s just further away.
So a good part of those three days went on something we’d stopped calling strategic: our own rhythm. How often we meet, review the goals we’ve set, and agree what we’re going to say about them once we walk back out the door and into a client call, a board update, or a Monday standup.
We run JH on EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System, and one of its plainer ideas is what Traction calls the Meeting Pulse: a fixed cadence of meetings, repeating weekly, monthly, quarterly, so the business runs on a heartbeat instead of whatever got booked into a gap in the diary. We didn’t sit down this week because ours was broken. We sat down because nobody had asked out loud in a while whether it still matched the size of company we’ve actually become.
The audit itself is almost insultingly simple, and worth doing whether you run EOS or nothing at all.
- Pull every recurring meeting off the calendar and put it in a list.
- Next to each one, write down how often it should actually happen, and when – based on what it’s for, not what it’s always been.
- Check that answer against the slot the meeting currently holds. A weekly stand-up earns its place by keeping work moving day to day. A quarterly review earns its place by forcing a step back nobody takes voluntarily.
Plenty of the meetings sitting on most leadership calendars were set at a size and stage of company that no longer exists, and nobody’s gone back to check whether the booking survived the reason for it.
The harder half is what that rhythm has to support outward, not just inward. It isn’t enough for a leadership team to be aligned with itself. Everyone the business depends on, from agencies to boards to the people three levels down who hear about decisions secondhand, needs to know the rhythm they’re plugged into as well. We’ve written before about how agencies get boxed into a meeting format that never lets them say the thing that actually matters – the same trap works in reverse. A board meeting that lands at the end of the quarter isn’t a surprise. It’s been on the calendar the whole time. If the two weeks of prep before it, and the four weeks before that, aren’t already planned backwards from the date, the “surprise” is a rhythm problem dressed up as a scheduling one.
That’s where the people question landed by the end of day three. Rewarding and enriching good people was never only a pay conversation. It’s whether they can predict, at a rhythm they can set their watch by, that someone senior is actually looking at what they’re doing and saying so, rather than waiting for an annual review to notice twelve months late.
The Goliaths in this industry can survive a rhythm that’s slightly off. They have the size to absorb it. We can’t, and neither can most of the businesses reading this.
We’ve always been David in that story. David never won on the shot alone. He won by choosing which stone to carry and which one to load, then trusting the practice behind it to make the throw count. Get the rhythm right and you’re doing the same thing: picking the right Rocks to fight for, and rehearsing your aim often enough that you don’t miss when it matters.
A company that only remembers to look up at the end of the quarter isn’t two steps ahead of anything. It’s catching up on a schedule it never actually chose.
This post originally appeared on Founder & CEO, Jamie Huskisson’s LinkedIn newsletter, Breakthrough Commerce.