A healthy meetings rhythm

The most powerful impact of having teams meet every day is the quick resolution of minor issues that might otherwise fester and create unnecessary busywork for the team. A big part of the beauty of the daily check-in is that leaders know they’re going to see their colleagues within twenty-four hours, so rather than firing off an e-mail or a voice mail or interrupting someone in the course of their day, they simply make a note to bring up a small issue at the next day’s meeting.

To note:

• Once teams get used to the daily check-in, they’re hooked.
• Getting used to doing the daily meeting will probably take a few weeks or a month. But once it happens, leaders find that they’re building stronger relationships with their peers much more quickly than they thought was possible. Moreover, they’re able to address minor issues quickly so they can be more focused on the right topics during the other three kinds of meetings they need to have.

When leaders complain about meetings, many of them are probably thinking about their weekly or biweekly or monthly staff meetings.

Patrick Lencioni says, “if you let me sit in the weekly leadership team meeting of any organisation for a month, I could predict its future success very accurately.”

The truth is, there is no more valuable activity in any organisation than the regular staff meeting of a leadership team. But if they are not effective, there is little or no chance of building a cohesive team or a healthy organisation.

There are a few critical keys to making staff meetings work. For instance, if there are too many people on a team, or if the people in the room don’t trust each other and aren’t willing to engage in productive conflict, then no matter how you reorganise your meetings you won’t see much impact.

However, assuming that a leadership team has bought into and is working on making their team small enough and behaviourally cohesive, they then need to change a few things about what they do before and during their staff meetings to make them compelling, useful, and yes, even enjoyable. We will unpack this further in the next section of this course.

Probably the most interesting and compelling of all meetings. In fact, it may be the most fun that leaders can have at work. The purpose of this kind of meeting is to dig into the critical issues that can have a long-term impact on an organisation or that require significant time and energy to resolve: a major operational threat, a disruptive change in the sector, a substantial shift in donations, a significant program deficiency, or even a troubling drop in morale, among many others.

Any of these issues would warrant more time, energy, and preparation than could ever be given during a regular weekly staff meeting. In fact, it’s difficult to imagine addressing any of them in less than a few hours. It easily takes that much time to frame up an issue, present even a cursory overview of basic research, brainstorm possible solutions, debate the merits of those solutions, and then come to a decision with real commitment. And yet leadership teams rarely carve out enough time for this. Instead, they try to resolve important issues in fifteen-minute increments in between more tactical and administrative topics during a staff meeting. The result is not only suboptimal decisions, but an immense sense of frustration among leaders.

To note:

• Separate tactical conversations from strategic ones. Combining the two just doesn’t work and leaves both sets of issues inadequately addressed.
• If a leadership team goes more than a month without a strategic meeting, something is probably wrong.
• When a team first adopts this new model of having separate meetings for specific strategic topics, there will almost always be a big backlog of issues that need to be addressed, so there will be an initial flurry of these kinds of meetings.

The problem with these meetings is that too often they are nothing more than an expensive and extended version of the unproductive staff meeting. The purpose of them, like each of the others, should be unique and focused.

In this case, that focus is all about stepping back from the business to get a fresh perspective, which is why it is best done away from the office. Activities that should be addressed during these meetings include reviewing the organisation’s strategic plans, assessing the performance of key employees, discussing sector changes, and of course, reviewing the behaviours of the team members in regard to cohesiveness.

In essence, the off-site review is where the leadership team needs to step back and revisit the vision and strategy of the organisation.

The timing of these meetings, unlike the others, is not really negotiable. There is just something about doing this four times a year that makes sense. More frequently than that doesn’t give a team enough time to make progress on critical issues and identify meaningful trends in the organisation. Less frequently usually means that people are going to forget about what they talked about at the previous meeting, which makes continuity difficult and progress unlikely.