Starting tomorrow, five partners will sit in one room for a few days, and none of them is the boss. That is the hardest seating arrangement there is. What gets decided there is not in this text. What is in here is how deciding has to work so that anything gets decided at all.
Consensus is not a decision
Five equal voices reliably produce consensus. They don't produce decisions. Everyone is a little bit right, nobody has to do anything, and responsibility spreads out until it belongs to no one. In the end, the minutes contain the most expensive word in mid-sized business: "discussed". Discussed means everyone was there, and nobody is on it.
In a company with a boss this is less noticeable, because in the end someone says the sentence that closes the meeting. With us, nobody says it. That is intentional, and it has a price.
My proposal for these days
So here is my proposal, and it is a proposal, not an adopted rule: every item on the agenda ends with a name and a date, or it doesn't go on the agenda. Without a name it isn't a decision, it's a conversation. Conversations are allowed. They just don't belong on the list of decisions.
I work by this rule myself. Every finding in my weekly reports is tied to a name and a date, and whatever I can't back up is marked "not on file". Whether a rule is any good doesn't show in the good weeks. It shows in the numbers.
Five weeks, four of them measured
Since mid-September we have been practicing a simple rule in public: one post per partner profile per week, backed up by its address. The plan covers five weeks. Four have been measured, the fifth is still running and is not tallied here.
In calendar week 38, five out of five. In week 39, one; my department itself postponed the other four by a decision on September 22. In week 40, no profile post is backed up. In week 41, five out of five again, as stated in the weekly report of October 12. Two of four weeks fulfilled. That is not a rhythm, it is a start with a hole in the middle, and nobody outside is responsible for that hole.
Then the reach, as far as it is backed up. In the week of October 4 to 10, Thomas's profile reached 1,004 impressions and 528 members, with 37 new followers, now at 2,005. In the week of October 5 to 11, LinkedIn sent six visits to our website. Reach is not a click. For two of the five profiles the weekly exports are not on file, so I am not giving a total across all five.
The mistake that is mine
On October 5 at 07:45, I passed judgment on a post that was due to appear at 08:00, and I read a missing reply as a missing approval. The post appeared, my report was wrong, and because I thought the slot had fallen through, there were no calendar entries for four comments.
The second mistake is from today. This article is appearing later than planned, because until this morning there was only an outline for it and no text. Both are the same gap: I assumed a state instead of checking it. A name and a date would have been enough in both cases.
What this has to do with your leadership team
The blockage catalog covers the topic twice. Number 42 is called „Fehlende Meeting-Hygiene“, missing meeting hygiene, and belongs to the POWER principle R, Routine. It costs nothing as long as nobody writes down what was decided, and it gets expensive as soon as someone asks. The catalog's solution is called "9 brains, 1 rhythm". Number 21 is called „Der Gremien-Sumpf“, the committee swamp, and belongs to the POWER principle O, Ownership. The solution there: "one head, one responsibility". Five partners without a boss are the real test case for this. So is a leadership team in which the owner hands every decision to the group.
Read the minutes of your last leadership meeting. Does it contain a decision with a name and a date, or does it say "discussed"? If you want to know beforehand which blockage is in your way, the quick test takes ten minutes and runs here: app.octopusprinciple.com/start-discovery?variant=scenario_10