Management Review, the Art and the Facilitator

An MR has three overarching phases: preparation; execution; and follow-up. The art of the MR lies in delineating and coordinating these three phases effectively. While the MR is “the CEO’s meeting,” the CEO may not have the time or inclination to manage it. This challenge is normally remedied by designating an MR Facilitator, either a company employee or an outside consultant, to act as the CEO’s agent. In an ISO-9001-certified company, the Quality Representative typically assumes the role of MR Facilitator.

If you are a CEO, you may be thinking, “why would I need some outside consultant to come in and tell us what to do? If I need help with this, I can ask one of my people to go on line, find a checklist (here is one, by the way), and just get ‘er done.” I call that “learning by doing” and, depending on who is carrying out the task, it might work out well; it is also true that no outsider can honestly guarantee success.

However, the cost to engage a consultant as Facilitator is actually a small part of the investment in an MR and, when matched against the potential payoff, looks even smaller. To the first point, each actor in the MR will have to take time away from daily activities to prepare for and play his role in the meeting (the execution phase). Whether this cost is hidden or explicit (charged to overhead), it can amount to a considerable investment of time. An experienced Facilitator should be able to raise the probability that such time is invested wisely.

As CEO, you may still be wondering, “What can an outsider, however experienced, possibly know about my company?” When he first comes on the scene, probably not much. However, his lack of knowledge just happens to be the key that lets the Facilitator unlock the power of an MR. A good Facilitator brings two critical qualities to an MR: first, the curiosity to learn as much as he can about your company as quickly as possible; and second, knowledge of the questions to ask – from an ISO-9001 perspective, your perspective, and his own perspective – in the form of briefing templates, to learn much of what he would need to know were he to be named the new CEO. To reinforce the point, the Facilitator brings process, but the knowledge specific to your company will come from within your company where it may now lay hidden.

To the second point, it will fall to the Facilitator to assure that the goals, objectives, and processes of each MR phase are clear to all. The Facilitator is responsible for asking the right questions of each actor at each stage of preparation and for making an initial judgment regarding whether the answers are sufficient. Another way to look at this is that, as the CEO’s agent, the Facilitator must understand what the CEO needs to know and when he needs to know it.

A tight focus will be critical to MR success. Less obvious, perhaps, is that attendee engagement is a necessary condition to that focus. It will be incumbent on the Facilitator to incorporate both challenge and humor in the MR to keep all attendees awake and active. If MR preparation, conduct, and follow-up are the art, the Facilitator is the artist.