An ever increasing challenge within the project and change environment is maintaining leadership alignment and effective communication with there being gravitation towards an owner-manager culture within organisations. This leadership and management culture, that regardless of your role or portfolio, you are fully empowered to deal with your day to day responsibilities, certainly offers many benefits such as promoting initiative, a sense of responsibility, team accountability, efficient decision making and team coherence within business areas. However, these benefits are often most experienced at business area or department level and less obviously so at segment, franchise or enterprise level, resulting in mini silo’s across the business. This is especially evident when new change initiatives impact multiple business units, areas and systems within a business.

From a change perspective, the owner-manager type of culture arguably poses two key challenges, namely; ‘leadership alignment’ and ‘quality stakeholder engagement’. The decentralised responsibility and accountability structure can result in complex programme structures and accountabilities with project streams operating as projects in their own right. This, in turn, results in multiple project managers, multiple project business owners and often multiple business sponsors, all who need to be continually aligned to the project vision, objectives and plan.

In an often unconscious attempt to address these challenges, meetings tend to become the order of the day. Not only do meetings become the main stakeholder engagement platform, they also become an ever increasing lifeline to project managers. This arises from the necessity to have the key business owners around a table in the hopes of extracting collective decisions for the purpose of gaining traction to meet ever looming programme deadlines.

Unfortunately, this has the project team and business owners running from meeting to meeting with very little time left to focus on actual deliverables.

So, what can change managers and project managers do to promote leadership alignment, decisiveness and consequently programme traction without compromising the many benefits offered by an owner-manager culture? Here are a few simple ideas based on my own learnings:

1. Reduce unnecessary meetings i.e. avoid meetings that could be emails.

Paul Axtell, in his book Meetings Matter, challenges business leadership to redesign the purpose and activities of meetings so that meetings can be leveraged for maximum impact. In my experience, many meetings could be news bulletins or emails as ones physical presence often contributes very little to the work at hand i.e. a complete waste of time! When meetings are used to avoid making decisions, or to spread the risk of owning a poor decision (hoping for others to collectively own the decision with you), this is when meetings detract from making progress. It also often results in doing other work in your meeting!

2. Meeting agendas should be multi-purposed.

Ensure that there is in fact a decision that needs to be made or that discussion is required – This would be the key purpose of the meeting. This ensures the feasibility of the meeting. However, also use the opportunity to communicate project and programme key messages and check for resistance areas. This can assist in reducing additional engagement session with key stakeholders while at the same time promoting cohesion and alignment.

3. Avoid meeting “Deja-vu”. Make sure the correct people are invited.

Have you ever sat in a meeting and thought “haven’t we already discussed this, multiple times?”. This could be a symptom of lack of leadership alignment between key decision makers. In an owner-manager environment it could also mean that nobody actually owns a particular piece of work or deliverable. One way to combat this is for the project team to build strong relationships with the key business owners and to familiarise themselves with the decision-making structure amongst those stakeholders. If you know who should be making the decision, you will know who to invite to the meeting.

4. Do your own thinking.

Avoid using meetings to trigger your own thinking, unless it’s a necessary brainstorming meeting. Wherever possible, when you raise issues for decision making, present possible solutions that you have applied yourself to. This allows for a more constructive meeting with solutions focus rather than over analysing problems and never reaching consensus.

5. Engage one-on-one with key stakeholders in addition to meaningful meetings.

This should be the project teams’ primary strategy for key stakeholder engagement. It can be informal or simply a 15 min to 30 min catch up on an ad-hoc basis. This offers relationship building opportunities, more customised leadership alignment conversations, socialisation of key ideas and decisions, highlighting of sensitive resistance issues and/or risks to the programme.