The 15-Minute Meeting Every Leadership Team Should Have
If a disruption hit your business tomorrow, would you know exactly how to respond?
Most businesses don't discover the gaps in their communication, decision-making, and operational plans until they're already dealing with one. As the year winds down, it's a good time to check your readiness. Start by bringing your leadership team together for 15 minutes to answer these five questions.
1. If our business stopped operating tomorrow, what would need to come back online first?
Identify the functions you can't operate without; customer support, payment processing, scheduling, order fulfillment, access to essential files. Knowing what to restore first keeps your team focused on what matters most instead of trying to fix everything at once.
2. Who makes decisions during a disruption?
Pressure exposes unclear ownership fast. When people don't know who's authorized to make the call, they wait for approval, duplicate work, or start separate conversations that slow everything down. Your team should know who kicks off the response, who updates employees, who talks to customers, and who works with vendors or IT partners.
3. How would we communicate if our usual tools went down?
Email, phones, and collaboration platforms feel reliable until they're not. If employees lost access to email, where would they find instructions? If your phone system failed, how would customers reach you? Where would leadership post updates? A backup communication plan gives everyone a dependable place to turn.
- What's our biggest operational dependency?
It could be a software platform, an internet connection, a third-party provider, or the one employee who understands a process nobody else fully knows. Naming these dependencies shows you where you need better documentation, testing, backups, or outside support.
- What would we wish we'd prepared?
Maybe it's a documented process, a tested backup, an updated contact list, or an agreed-on order for bringing systems back online. Preparation is what lets you respond deliberately instead of scrambling.
Turn the answers into action
These five questions will show you where your plans are solid and where they still rely on assumptions — and how your people, systems, and processes need to work together when something goes wrong. A good IT partner can help close those gaps: testing recovery processes, checking backups, and documenting what matters most, so your team has a clear plan to lean on when things don't go as expected.