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Saturday, October 5, 2024
Turn Boring Meetings into Productive Powerhouses
“Mike, we just don’t seem to making much progress despite the fact that we’re all so busy. I’m worried that the team are stressed and frustrated.”
“Ok lets try and get to the root cause of this and get you all into a better place..
How often do you and your leadership team meet?”
“Well, we used to meet regularly but a few people felt the meetings weren’t a good use of our time and then we got super busy so we haven’t met for a few months now and don’t have any structured meeting cadence”
If you’re going to the gym for three months and don’t get stronger, you don’t stop going to the gym, you fix what you’re doing at the gym.
I don’t know how you can run a team or business effectively without having meetings.
Meetings are essential for you and your team to connect, to get aligned, to share data and to plan.
Done right a meeting is engaging and productive.
Done wrong meetings are frustrating and painful.
Having no meetings also leads to frustration, isolation and inefficiencies.
Today I’m going to show you the step by step format we provide our clients to make their regular team or leadership meetings effective so you can implement a variation of it into your business/team.
Cadence
How often should you have meetings?
There’s no definitive answer to this but we’ve found a cadence that seems to work in most scenarios.
Yearly 2 day plan - Quarterly or Monthly 1 day planning - Weekly 60-90 minutes
Today we’ll focus on the weekly meeting.
Depending on your position you might do the above cycle twice as you do it once with the senior leadership team and once with your own team.
Effective Weekly Meeting Format - 90 minutes
Full disclosure - I learnt this process from the fantastic business book 'Traction'. Through working with clients we have adapted it over the years and I've added my won commentary here but do not claim this system to be my own.
0-5 minutes - Wins
What’s gone well? What’s been achieved? Get everyone in your team (including you) to contribute.
The human mind is hardwired for survival which it does by spotting what’s wrong (potential danger).
Therefore without a disciplined focus on what’s going well team very easily fall into a negative culture of only focussing on what’s wrong.
5-10 minutes - Top 3-10 Numbers
What numbers tell you and your team, black and white, how well things are going?
Every department in every business should have this. If you don’t have them no stress, you can make this a priority in your next full day quarterly meeting.
Examples: Number of appointments booked, number of sales made, number of new followers on social media, total profit, total revenue, customer NPS score average, number of sessions delivered
10-15 minutes - OKR Progress
We train all teams to have quarterly objectives and key results. Once every 12 weeks you spend a full day planning your objectives and measurable targets for the next quarter.
At this point in the meeting you check in on these results to see how they are or aren’t progressing.
Note: You do not try to solve issues at this point or get lost in conversation, you simply share progress or lack of.
15-20 minutes - Customer & Employee Reviews
Key stories around clients. Wins, losses, concerns.
20-25 minutes - Previous Commitments
And the end of the weekly meeting commitments are assigned to people. This is where we again, black and white without deep conversation check if tasks were or were not completed.
25-55 Minutes - Problem Solve & To-Do
This is the part of the meeting where you get to do what everyone has been wanting to do throughout the rest of the meeting - discuss and solve problems.
But first you have to list and hierarchy the topics for discussion.
Everybody wants to talk about what’s top of their mind, but if you let that happen nothing gets achieved.
As a team you list key issues on a whiteboard in hierarchy of importance.
If any of the issues do not need the full team to be addressed the appropriate people arrange a separate time to address that issue.
As a team you then work through the hierarchy of problems.
If you only solve one problem in the time you have you make peace with that and return to it next week.
New to do’s are then put into a table with corresponding owners names attached.
55-60 Minutes - Meeting Review
Finally everyone provides open and honest feedback on the meeting so that it become a self improving efficiency system.
Final Tips
We provide templates for this in the Better Happy Business Systems course which is available below (If you’re reading this on the website).
Get this just half right and you’ll get more done, with more fun, in less time.
If you’re an online team you can use a whiteboard tool like MIRO or a simpler tool like Google Sheets.
Example of meeting flow being managed by us on Miro
Example of meeting being handled on Google Sheets (this is the OKR 5 minute Check In)
- Nominate someone to record the issues and to dos. This person ensures the previous weeks information is always readily available in the current weeks meeting.
- Leave your ego at the door
- Nominate a time keeper and give them the unquestionable power to cut people off in order to keep the meeting on track
- Do the meeting at the same time every week - or in whatever cadence you choose
From doing this with so many teams here are my final top tips to help you be successful:
As you start making more efficient progress towards your goals and effectively handling issues, stress is reduced whilst fulfilment is increased - win.
Getting this right is one of the most powerful things you can do for the morale and efficiency of your team.
About Mike & Better Happy
I am a best selling author, business owner and consultant. As a previous military intelligence analyst, resident with monks and burnt out business owner, I now help business owners, leaders and managers create cultures of health, happiness and high performance without burnout.