Ask a leadership team how they're executing and most will show you a dashboard. Green, amber, red. Progress against targets. It looks like execution, and a lot of the time it's only reporting.
From inside the room, the difference is easy to see. It isn't in the data. It's in what the team does with it.
Two meetings that changed
I've watched this happen in two very different organisations, and what changed was the same in both.
The first was a family-owned grocery business. The team had been through several rounds of strategy work, and the plans were fine. What they lacked was any sense of what was going on. Meetings were long and energetic, with a lot of people talking and very few decisions. The executive team was frustrated, and some of the people who could actually decide weren't always in the room.
We ran the first proper performance meeting with a simple format. Nobody listed what they had done. Each leader said where they needed help, or where they needed a decision. That was it.
It changed the tone straight away. Leaders who had been working in separate corners started to say things like "I need something from your team," and then to arrange it. By the end of that first meeting, people who had barely cooperated were forming coalitions.
The second was a digital product team at a large insurer. Their monthly business review had grown to around 40 people and had become a communication session, where information was presented to a room that couldn't do much with it. After working through the performance meeting step, they cut it to around 15 people, the ones who could make decisions. The information still went out to everyone, but it was no longer presented. They've since done the same with several other meetings, and stopped doing inside meetings the work that can be done outside them.
Looking back and looking forward
Both of those changes come down to the same shift. A meeting that reports looks backwards: here's what we did, here's where the number landed. A meeting that executes looks forwards, using the same numbers to ask a different set of questions.
Where is this heading if we change nothing? What would make the difference? Who do I need, and what do they need from me? What are we deciding today?
This is why the data matters less than people think, and why the right kind of data matters more. A measure that tells you the outcome after the fact can only support a conversation about the past. A measure that tells you early, before the outcome is confirmed, gives the team something to act on. That's what makes a conversation forward-looking, and it's why I'm picky about what goes into a key result: it has to be something the team can get, and something that someone can influence.
What the meeting is for
None of this is a new idea. Plenty has been written about status updates versus decisions, and if that's all I had to say, it wouldn't be worth another post. How often to meet is a separate question, and I've written about that before. What I find in the room is more specific. Teams know in theory that a review meeting should produce decisions. They struggle because the format of the meeting makes it easier to report than to ask. People turn up ready to defend their progress, and the data becomes evidence for that defence.
Change the format, and the behaviour follows. A person who has to say "here's where I need a decision" can't hide behind a slide. A room of 15 people who all have the authority to act can't leave without agreeing something. And when the people who can decide are the people in the room, the information that used to be presented becomes the thing that's read beforehand.
A simple test
At the end of your next performance meeting, ask what was decided. If the answer is a list of updates, the meeting reported on the past. If it's a priority that moved, a resource that shifted, or a date that changed, the meeting was doing the job.
Execution is visible in a team that talks about the future, asks each other for things, and leaves with something to do. The dashboard only tells you whether it's working.