Team Meetings - yes they're necessary
Have a weekly team meeting. This one piece of advice I give leadership teams every time I speak with them is also the one thing I seem to get the most push back on. Now, often this is because the meetings they are having are unstructured and therefore unproductive so the idea of doing more of them seems like a waste of time.
Having and sticking to an agenda will add structure to your management team meeting. It’s the difference between sitting around talking about the business and having a purposeful conversation where you leave with actionable steps.
Here are some helpful hints and tips for a successful weekly team meeting:
- Have a set agenda (topics for the agenda)
- Good news
- Company scorecards (tracking system)
- Employee and customer headlines
- IDS (identify, discuss solve) issues
- Cascading message (what do we need to communicate to the staff)
- Have a leader for the meeting
- Assign specific tasks to each person prior to ending the meeting.
- Have it at the same time each week
- Keep the meeting to 90 mins max
- Put the meeting in your recurring meeting in your calendar
When you are meeting with your staff and going over the above listed items weekly there isn’t time for small issues to become large ones without you knowing. It gives you the opportunity to make changes/ shifts quickly before it’s too late to do anything about it. This applies to the company culture and staff engagement as well as the profitability of jobs and ability to keep customers in the loop in a proactive manner.
