The Steering Committee’s meetings, where high-level executives meet once a month, are one of the classical control, activity tracking and decision making mechanisms in companies.

This type of meeting is more or less structured depending on the company’s business culture and the best use of the time and costs of bringing together executives of this level is a challenge that not all companies manage to do successfully.

One of the most effective mechanisms to structure the content of a steering committee’s meetings is a Balance Scorecard, and below we will see why.

Let us assume a company with an implemented Balance Scorecard. This means that it has a group of strategic objectives defined and assigned to several members of the steering committee, each measurable through one or more indicators and backed up by one or more improvement projects, also called initiatives. For example, the strategic objective “Grow in the occasional tourist market” is assigned to the “Commercial Director”, is measured with the “Sales in the occasional tourist market” and has two initiatives that back up this objective: (1) Study of more innovating promotions in the occasional tourist market (2) Search for 10 products for the occasional tourist market.

In this company, the Balance Scorecard is generated on the 12^th day of every month, and the members of the steering committee receive an email inviting them to analyse that month’s Balance Scorecard (and the annual trend) and to analyse the performance of the strategic objectives each one has assigned. So that each one can prepare the analysis with comments on the situation and the corrective actions they plan to carry out. This individual preparation helps to ease the steering committee meeting that will be held a few days later.

In this example, the company usually holds the steering committee meeting on the third Thursday of every month, between the 16 and 21 of each month. This meeting is carried out in a structured way with the presentation of each of the members of the steering committee on the status of their strategic objectives and the corrective plans they propose. In these meetings, in addition to the presenters who will always have the same order of intervention and have a fixed presentation time, there is usually the formal role of the secretary and president. The secretary mainly has two objectives: (1) Document all the meeting and write the subsequent minutes and (2) Facilitate the compliance of the time periodically, announcing the time left in each intervention. The president, who is normally the Managing Director, is in charge of (1) Understanding and clearing up the situation the strategic objectives are in and (2) Reach a consensus on the corrective actions to be carried out and which are presented by each member of the steering committee, and their priorities.

When it is a large company, it has many decision levels and there may be several Balance Scorecards from top to bottom, for example a main one for the steering committee and a Balance Scorecard for each of the divisions and/or departments. The “Balance Scorecard tracking committee” meetings are therefore held first in each division, in order to subsequently carry out the steering committee tracking meeting. The scaling of problems and decisions from top to bottom is so helped, at the same time as preparing the steering committee even better as each member can have attended the Balance Scorecard tracking meeting with their area previously.

There is no other way to carry out a strategy, and therefore a group of strategic objectives, than making it progress daily, weekly, monthly, and therefore it is necessary that the normal analysis and decision making work be aligned with this strategy. The way for the strategy to represent the company’s reality is for the problems and challenges each member of the steering committee faces to be reflected in it, and for these matters to be treated in a detailed and structured manner every month. This operating model really helps to improve the exploitation of the executive’s time, to make better decisions and develop a culture of commitment-a tremendously satisfactory performance for the people and a high performance for the company.