I use a handful of methods for setting context across the company, but my primary platforms are our E-staff (Executive Staff) and our Quarterly Business Review (QBR) meetings. A few times a year we bring together all the leaders (top 10 to 15 percent of people) of the company from around the world. It starts with a long meeting or dinner with my half dozen direct reports—people like Ted and Greg Peters and our head of HR Jessica Neal. Then I spend a day with E-Staff (all VPs and above) and then we have two days of presentations, sharing, and debates at QBR (all directors and above—about 10 percent of the entire workforce).

The number one goal for these meetings is to make sure that all leaders across the company are highly aligned on what I call our North Star: the general direction we are running in. We don’t need to be aligned on how each department is going to get where they are going—that we leave to the individual areas—but we do need to make sure we are all moving in the same direction.

Before and after QBR, we make available many dozens of pages of Google Docs memos to every employee, explaining all the context and content we shared at QBR. This information is read not just by QBR participants but also by people at all levels of the company, including administrative assistants, marketing coordinators, you name it.

Between QBRs, I hold ongoing one-on-one meetings to get a feel for how aligned we actually are and where context is lacking. I have one thirty-minute meeting with each director once a year. That makes about 250 hours of meetings with people who are three to five levels below me in the org chart. In addition, I meet with each vice president (two to three levels below me) for one hour every quarter. This results in another 500 hours of meetings annually. When Netflix was smaller, I met with each person more frequently, but I still spend about 25 percent of my annual time on all these meetings.

Within each theme, the company lists smaller “Rocks” (column 5 of the OPSP) that need to be addressed in order to achieve the company’s big goal for the next 13 weeks, helping to focus everyone on execution. Though employees do not discuss the themes during daily huddles, which are focused on daily operations, they devote 30 minutes at weekly meetings to addressing progress toward the Quarterly Theme.

Bumping into each other all day doesn’t substitute for tightly focused team discussions. And a lot of that bumping is causing unnecessary interruptions. Casual encounters fail to take advantage of the three most powerful tools a leader has in getting team performance:

1. Peer pressure

2. Collective intelligence

3. Clear communication

Doing this requires one simple routine: a well-structured, one-day monthly management meeting that includes everyone who supervises or manages anyone in the business. It should be a day focused on learning, sharing, and problem-solving vs. a day of mind-numbing reports.

We encourage management teams to set aside an hour or more each month to brainstorm ways to improve each of these cash cycle components. This is a powerful exercise to do with the broader middle-management team at a half- to full-day monthly management meeting. It will give everyone a better understanding of how cash flows through the business and how each function can contribute positively.