How to run a great weekly meeting

We start on time with personal or professional good news. This aids in transitioning our minds from working in the organisation to working on the organisation. It also helps grow team health with a human element.

This helps us keep tabs each week on whether our constituents, employees and volunteers arehappy. Again, we’re looking for headlines—no commentary. Any bad reports move onto the issues list.

This approach helps us avoid getting bogged down before the meeting gets started, stuck in one of those exhausting reporting sessions where we’re spending an hour just sharing news, making excuses, and discussing the same things over and over.

To note:

The next three elements of the meeting structure are speed reporting only. No discussions, no excuses, no solving.

To make sure we’re hitting our numbers each week, we’ll quickly report on our Scorecard, if we have one in place. Here we simply describe each measurable as either on track or off track. There’s no need to discuss those items at this point in the meeting. Once again, we just move any off-track numbers to the issues list.

We’ll then take the same approach with our 90-day goals, reviewing both organisational and individual 90-day goals and letting each leader say his or her 90-goals are either on track or off track. Anything that’s off track simply moves onto the issues list.

Seven-day action itemsare tasks weall agree need to get done before next week’s meeting. When you get to the 7-day action items listeach week, we’ll go down the list asking each person whether it was done or not-done.

This discipline helps us get to the point at which 90% of the 7-day action items are dropping off every week. It creates accountability and helps everyone get more done.

When we master the weekly meeting, we’ll spend two-thirds of the meeting each week solving problems with the Define, Discuss, Decide (DDD) model.

How does DDD work?

• Prioritise the three most important issues on the issues list.
• Start with the first one and DDD.
• Define the issue (clarify what exactly we are dealing with),
• Discuss it briefly (with everyone saying what needs to be said only once, because more than once is politicking)
• Decide on a plan to solve it.
• Add any relevant tasks to the 7-day action items, and then go to issue number two.
• If we solve all three issues, just prioritize the next three most important issues, and repeat until we run out of time.

To note:

Some weeks we’ll solve ten issues; some weeks we’ll solve one. As long as we’re tackling the most important issues, we’ll always be using our time wisely.

Wherever we are withfive minutes left in the meeting, we conclude by doing three simple things.

• Recap our 7-day action items.
• Clarify cascading messages.
• Did something happen in the meeting that needs to be shared with others? If so, we must all agree on who’s going to tell them, what we are going to tell them, and how we are going to tell them.
• Share any highlights or new ideas that came forth in the meeting.
• Rating our meetings each week helps us self-correct. It forces us to work together to get better at meeting—to become more open and more productive.