Have you ever attended a meeting where other people droned on about their work status updates that had absolutely nothing to do with you or 90% of the other people in the meeting? That’s a major waste of time for everyone. Worse yet, it disengages your people and lowers your management credibility.
I first posted this topic on Linked In and you can join the Linked In conversation here.
To make those weekly team meetings much more productive and engaging for everyone, I have a simple three step process. At each meeting, everyone shares at least one success, one challenge, and one priority.
When you do this process, the energy rises immediately. People actually start listening to their peers.
Figure 86.1: Three steps to an engaging meeting.
Successes
Since management is notorious for focusing on what isn’t working, discussing successes gives people an opportunity to share their wins. This raises awareness for what is working well. The wins might be minor like completing a task more quickly or getting caught up on their workflow. Or, they might be major, like attracting a new customer or employee, or developing or improving a process that allows others to complete tasks more quickly.
Successes are the momentum for future risk taking, learning, and more successes.
Challenges
We are all reluctant to ask for help.
“Asking for help is a sign of strength.”
When people are sharing their challenges or frustrations, it gives other people an opportunity to discuss how they overcame similar challenges in the past. Sharing experiences is much more effective than straight out giving advice, especially unsolicited advice. This also enables people to offer help to each other. Now, you’re creating a team that works together and wins (or loses) together.
Sharing challenges elevates inefficient systems and processes for team discussions every week. If you have a team of five people meeting weekly, you’re potentially solving or improving 250 challenges every year.
Priorities
This is a weekly meeting so we want to hear what the priorities are for the next week. If someone has ten priorities, they really don’t have any priorities. This process helps management to align their people to the strategic priorities and make sure everyone is working on their most important task.
You can introduce themes for people to focus on each week, such as improving customer service or asking for emails so you can shift from in-store selling to online selling. Discussing priorities helps people to look further ahead for upcoming milestones or deadlines, like a year-end or a customer presentation.
Clear priorities help everyone to focus. They help you to help your team to succeed each week. Now that’s time well spent.
Think about the momentum you’ll gain. For every person on your team, they’re sharing 50 successes, discussing 50 challenges, and focusing on 50 priorities every year. That’s a lot of progress and energy created in a weekly team meeting.
Are your weekly team meetings this productive and energizing? If not, give me a call. Let’s talk.
Full speed ahead!
Thanks for reading.
