This is a basic question, once a while everybody asks or shares with colleagues. Why the CEO or Higher management do Weekly reviews? Does that make any impact? Here I would like to share a simple story of FORD.
In 2006, when Alan Mullaly , joined FORD as a CEO, the company was not making good business, ford was facing lot of trouble. He took first move to have a regular weekly review meeting with team. The executives or managers need to present tasks/initiatives with status defining Not Done/Work-in-progress/Completed showing color as Red/Yellow/Green.
In every meetings, every person showing slides are marked Green or someday orange. They are very used to see good things and appreciations.
This continued until he threw up his hands in frustration wondering aloud that however, everything is marked green every week but i am not getting any insight out of it and – “We are going to lose billions of dollars this year. Is there anything that’s not going well here?”
Finally, after weeks of getting deeper and breaking tasks in subtasks, one executive – Mark Fields, the Head of Operations – turned one slide red. This was a decision that would have lost his job under previous leadership.
When Mullaly saw the slide, he clapped, thanked him for the visibility, and asked everyone in the room if someone could help bring the initiative back on track. A valuable discussion followed (for a change).
Over time, other executives followed Marks’ lead and brought more colorful slides to these review. More valuable discussions followed. These discussions contributed to Ford’s turnaround in the subsequent years.
To change outcomes, we need to change behavior. And, to change behavior, we need to change the culture.
