Alice works for Big Corporation. She has been with the company for quite a few years now and she is very proud of the progress she has made in the organization.

She started as an office junior and with hard work and a professional approach to everything she tackles she has worked herself up to what most people in the company refer to as middle management. She has a wonderful team of her own, but she is also part of the management team that answers to the senior managers, who in turn report to the directors of the business, who in turn report to the President/CEO.

Three months ago she introduced Weekly Debrief to her team. It took a few weeks for everyone to get the hang of it, but now everyone loves the benefits they are seeing from completing weekly status reports on a regular basis. Indeed, Alice’s success with Weekly Debrief hasn’t gone unnoticed. At a recent middle management team meeting all the managers were asked a tough question. The only middle manager who could answer it immediately was Alice. She’d taken printed copies of the most recent Weekly Debrief reports to the meeting and the information she needed was right there for everyone to see.

After the meeting her manager took her to one side and asked how she found the time to put together such a professional report each week. Alice smiled and explained how Weekly Debrief works.

The manager suggested that they introduce weekly status reports throughout the company and have everything feeding directly into the CEO.

That’s when Alice got in touch with me.

She had five questions. All good ones.

1. Would this up-the-organizational-tree kind of reporting work?
2. Did we have any experience of companies having everyone send a weekly status report directly to the CEO?
3. Was this something we would recommend?
4. Was there a better way for people to report from the bottom of the organizational chart to the top?
5. How easy is it to implement such a strategy?

At this point I have to declare that this is definitely not the first time we’ve been asked this question. Once managers start to see the benefit of having weekly status reports, and manage to successfully implement such a system, word spreads very quickly. Before long other managers within the same company are asking how they should go about doing it, just as they did with Alice.

In our experience the best way to do this – and it works incredibly well – is to have each team report to their manager. When that manager receives all the status updates he or she summarizes it for their manager. In that way a senior manager might well receive six or more team summaries from their line managers. They would in turn summarize that information for their direct line manager, and so on – all the way to the top of the organization.

You’ll be amazed at how little time it takes to summarize the key points from your team. You know your manager doesn’t want chapter and verse on everything, and so you instinctively know what you should and shouldn’t include.

Now here’s the brilliant thing …

An office junior can mention something incredibly pertinent in their weekly status update. Their manager realizes how pertinent it is and so includes it in the report to their manager. The next manager up the chain does the same thing and that very same comment ends up in the report that is given to the President/CEO.

How you would feel if you were that office junior?

Without this kind of system what would be the chances of this ever happening? The answer is pretty much zero!

On Monday we’ll continue the theme of using Weekly Debrief for multiple teams within an organization and how a single manager, such as Alice, can have multiple teams, whilst at the same time being on multiple teams herself.