Meetings and Decision Making

Decision Making at Stockwell

As we grow it’s important to become more deliberate about how we make decisions and the escalation process for disagreements. Here is the process we are trying to follow.

• You should feel empowered to make decisions without asking - there are very few decisions we can’t walk back. When you do this it’s your responsibility is to communicate what you've done and respond to questions and concerns.
• We try our best to come to a consensus in meetings, and we can get there for the most part, but it’s not always possible, necessary or expedient. Each meeting should have a decider to make progress when a consensus can’t be reached. This person ultimately makes the call. The decider is usually the most senior person in the room but could be the subject matter expert or the person that calls the meeting.
• If a decision needs to be made, don’t leave the meeting until the decision is clear.
• It's okay to disagree with a decision. In those cases you can jointly escalate the decision with the decider to the next person up in the management chain. This process works for every decision, even up to the highest levels. The entire leadership team in bought into this practice and will gladly do so if you strongly disagree with their decision. This only works if both people escalate together, don’t go behind someone’s back.
• Once a decision is made you can still disagree but you need to commit to the decision and do your best to support it until it plays itself out. If, at some point in the future, it is clear the decision didn’t work out we can revisit it.
• We want to be thoughtful about how decisions will affect others but know that you will be required to make a decision on behalf of others and that its your job to understand their point of view before the meeting and communicate the outcome. If there is strong disagreement after the decision is made you can jointly escalate to the decider.

Meetings at Stockwell

Meetings are an important function for any organization. Meetings help us align on priorities, understand and deal with anomalies in our business and communicate and escalate what’s happening in our functional area. Here are some guidelines for good meetings.

• Set an agenda and send it out before the meeting, make sure there is a decider in the room and people know who that is, send out notes after the meeting.
• Recurring meetings are really expensive for a company. If there isn’t an agenda you can cancel the meeting and give people their time back.
• It's up to the meeting creator to ensure that meeting is productive and that people attend the meeting. As an attendee, if a meeting isn’t valuable to you, don’t go to it. Let the creator know it's not valuable and hold them accountable for creating agendas and sending out notes. Meeting note template/best practices.
• In general, the larger the meeting gets the harder it is for it to be productive. Keep meetings small and invite people to make decisions on behalf of their team.
• When meetings are kept small not everyone who wants to attend is invited. If you find yourself in that situation, the best thing to do is to express your point of view to the person who is representing your interest in meeting ahead of time. If you feel there isn’t someone that can represent you, let the creator know and they can decide to invite you or seek your input before the meeting.

No Meeting Thursday

Thursdays are blocked off for the entire company, please try not to schedule any meetings on Thursday with other folks from Stockwell. Have one day free of meetings helps us ensure there is dedicated time for in-depth, focused work.