When I say “data-centric meetings,” I don’t mean de-humanizing meetings where the people element goes away. What I generally mean is that we’re adding an element to meetings that never existed before.

Several years ago, I was working with a $13 million professional services firm in Columbia, MO. They invited me to their Wednesday morning breakfast meetings. I observed and did not talk. Oh man, how I wanted to. Two more weeks passed, and I was ready to scrap the meeting format for something far better.

The tone of each meeting was that each manager, about 6 total plus the owner and me, would go over the hot topics of the prior and upcoming week. Rinse and repeat. Performance and quantified operational deficits were never addressed.

I’m no data jock, but at the time I was good at accessing data, normalizing it, and analyzing performance with Tableau. New ballgame, and I’ll show and explain what we started doing differently. I’ll also address the underlying purpose of what we were trying to accomplish.

If you already have weekly data-centric meetings with your management team, skip this article. If not, don’t use this as a framework. Learn from it and decide how you can first adapt to a performance-minded business without removing the people element of your organization.

There is no such thing as a magic elixir where you copy another person’s meeting agenda replete with measures, stats, and deficiencies. You need something else that you would never capture if you attended these meetings for three months or more.