Today’s businesses face global competition and rising costs, and to overcome these challenges, they need their workforce to be more than the sum of their parts. One way they achieve this is through team-work and collaboration, which means more team meetings.
Unfortunately, most businesses aren’t very good at team meetings. Businesses work hard to drive effective practices, yet effective team meetings remain elusive. In fact, most managers haven’t received any formal training in meeting facilitation. To complicate the issue, social skills are decline, making collaboration painful and difficult. As a result, many people dread team meetings, and great results are rare.
So how can we produce great results from team meetings when attendees dread them and organizers don’t know how to run them? This article will help by showing you how to run effective team meetings that people will look forward to.
Why Do We Even Have Team Meetings?
Some of the most common complaints about meetings are that they’re redundant or ought to have been an email. In spite of these complaints, it’s generally accepted that collaboration is necessary to move an organization forward. This is why the most successful organizations, from startups to Fortune 500 companies, continue to have them.
The key is to make them effective and to do that, you need to start by understanding what a meeting is for and what it isn’t:
What Are Team Meetings For?
Team Meetings are for any type of discussion that requires people with different skills and experiences to come together to solve a problem. The power of a team meeting is its ability to produce high-quality ideas quickly by mobilizing the different abilities of individual team members.
Imagine trying to make a strategic decision or a process change without a meeting? You’d circulate your idea by email, wait for responses, implement changes, recirculate and repeat until everyone’s satisfied. Instead, you can get everyone in the room at once, flesh out the problem and produce a solution everyone can commit to in one go.
On rare occasions, you’ll use a team meeting to make a life-changing announcement (such as a merger or a re-organization) where you expect several people to have similar concerns. In this case, a meeting is a good idea because it shows respect by doing it face to face and it saves you time from answering the same questions over and over. However, don’t hide a major announcement in the regularly scheduled meeting agenda or you could damage the trust you have with your team.
What Are Team Meetings Not For?
Team meetings are not for sharing updates where no discussion is required. If all you have are updates, share the information by email instead.
Managers are often tempted to hold a team meeting just for the sake of ‘team-building’. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work. Teams bond by working through challenges together, not by sitting at a table staring at a wall. Instead of building a team-culture, you’ll damage it. Some people will get annoyed at others for talking too much and delaying the end of the meeting. Meanwhile, those who are enthusiastic about the meeting will feel underappreciated and discouraged.
Team meetings can be a good place to build your team’s culture, but only when your agenda is conducive to it. Start by including discussion topics that concern the majority of meeting attendees. If you’ve got a topic that involves two out of ten people, have those meet separately instead. It kills the energy in a room when people have no interest in a meeting topic. Once people check out and start looking at their phones, it’s hard to get them fully-engaged again.
If you are already meeting, it’s ok to spend 5 minutes on ‘house-keeping’ updates. Just don’t let them be the highlight of your agenda.
Start with Great Planning
Chairing a great meeting starts long before it’s called to order. A great meeting facilitator makes sure that the time, environment and participant mindsets are optimized for great results.
Pick a Good Time
The first step to planning a great team meeting is picking a great time. Your goal should be to maximize energy, limit distractions and minimize the impacts on the business.
You’ll get the best energy and participation by holding your team meeting around 10 am. This is a great time to meet because people have had their coffee and you avoid the post-lunch crash and end-of-day clock-watching. Tuesdays are ideal as people will have gotten caught up from the weekend but won’t yet be bogged down from the week.
Along with physiological considerations, you should take participants’ existing schedules into account. This is about respect and consideration. You don’t want to make people choose between your meeting and something else they’ve committed to. You don’t want to be the reason someone misses a deadline or breaks a commitment to a client or stakeholder.
If you find a time that works for most but not all, see if those with conflicts can shuffle their calendars. If not, let them know that you’ll proceed with the team meeting and have someone fill them in afterward. If it’s a recurring meeting, let them know you’ll expect them there the next time.
Book a Good Room
The meeting space has a huge impact on the effectiveness of your team meeting. For instance, natural light keeps people alert and warmth enhances productivity. In contrast, dim light drains energy and cold temperature is distracting.
Try and find a warm room with windows and natural light, comfortable chairs and some plants or art on the wall. A comfortable and welcoming meeting room will promote increased creativity, productivity, and engagement.
If there are no good meeting rooms, consider holding the meeting at a nearby coffee shop or even outside. The slight inconvenience is worth paying for the great results you’ll get.
Solicit Ideas from Participants
A few days before the team meeting, send an email asking participants to send any topics they’d like to discuss. Set a deadline for submissions that gives you enough time to consider what to include and what to leave off. If you include their item, have them lead that discussion. Sometimes, you’ll get some really great ideas from the team!
Make a Great Agenda
A great team meeting needs a solid framework, with thoughtfully considered guidelines, discussion topics, expectations, and objectives.
Personalize Your Team Meetings
Team meetings are an important culture-builder, so it’s a good idea to start your agenda with something unique to your team. My meetings start by acknowledging the Indigenous peoples on whose traditional land we are meeting. I believe it’s a good way to show respect and appreciation for others, which is a value I always try to build with my teams.
Prioritize the Order of Agenda Items
The main reason you bring people together for a team meeting is to solve problems and come up with ideas. This means you need to facilitate a creative process, which takes time. To ensure you give time for a full discussion, you’ll have to choose what’s included today and what’s left for another time.
There’s always a possibility that a great and productive conversation breaks out that you don’t want to cut off. If this happens, don’t rush through the rest of the agenda. Instead, defer whatever topics you don’t cover to a future team meeting. Give yourself the flexibility to do this by placing high-urgency items near the start of the agenda and low-urgency items towards the end.
Consider this: a person can pay full attention for about 45 minutes. For a complex discussion, you’ll need about 10 minutes. This means you can effectively cover 3 topics with time left for housekeeping and a round-table discussion at the end.
Include a Round-Table Discussion
Over the years, the part my teams have looked forward to most is the round-table. In a round-table, each person has an opportunity to ask questions to the group in a non-judgmental way. Questions are typically something like “I ran into this situation the other day, has anyone else experienced something similar and what did you do?” I’ve found this activity to be a powerful team builder and an easy way to get everyone aligned.
The first time or two of including this on an agenda, you might not get much discussion. As the facilitator, you should plant seeds throughout the week. If someone asks you a question that could benefit from a team discussion, say something like “That’s a great question, can you bring that up during the round-table at our team meeting?”. In no time, people will start saving their questions for the round-table. This means less of your time spent answering questions, and more team-work and collaboration. Two big wins!
People might have experienced round-tables at a previous job. If so, this was likely a time where they were expected to report out on their work. This is unfortunately common in team meetings and is a horrendous experience for everyone. If you need to de-program your staff from doing this, you can say something like “This is not a time to report your work. This is a time for you to ask questions or share news that affects the whole team.”
I always schedule these last on the agenda because I find it keeps people engaged all the way to the end. Plus, there’s a chance that whatever question a person had will get answered by the time we get there.
It’s important to show your team that they are the priority. A good way to do this is to never skip the round-table, even if you have to postpone some other agenda item. Over time, this will become one of your most productive agenda items and the one your team looks forward to.
Chair Team Meetings Effectively
A Chairperson is above all else, a meeting facilitator. For this part, let’s assume the team meeting has begun and you are facilitating it.
Start Team Meetings On-Time, Even if Some People are Late
A lot of people have worked in places where it’s normal for meetings to start late. Don’t let this be your team. First, it shows disrespect to the people who made it on time. Second, it cuts into the meeting agenda. Every minute you wait is a minute taken from an important discussion in an already packed agenda. Third, it’s an irresponsible waste of resources when people sit around doing nothing, all of whom have work to do.
If someone is late, don’t offer to catch them up, but don’t shut them out of the discussion either. Brush it off and carry on. When the team meeting is over, take them aside and let them know that you expect them to be on time for the next one. They’ve likely been in work environments where it wasn’t a big deal to be late for a meeting, so don’t be too harsh. Simply let them know what your expectations are. Once this expectation has been set, treat further lates the same way you would if they arrived late for work.
Facilitate Productive Conversations
If a conversation starts going in circles, cut it off and move on. You can say something like “I think we’ve fleshed out this topic, shall we move on?” If people resist, offer to take two more quick comments and then move to the next topic. If a conversation strays into a separate topic altogether, cut it off and add the topic to the ‘parking lot’. You can discuss items in your parking lot at the end of the team meeting if there’s time, or add them to a future agenda.
If people start talking over one another, or a small number of people dominate the conversation, start a ‘speaker’s list’. You don’t have to stick to the order that people put their hands up either, you can manage the list however you want. For instance, if one person talks a lot, and someone else doesn’t, you can call on the latter first. By managing a speaker’s list, you can help ensure that everyone gets involved.
And finally, don’t be afraid to call on people if you think they’re being shy but you know they’ve got something to add. People are becoming more and more shy and hesitant to speak up in groups. A good facilitator prompts people when necessary. Don’t think that you need to let people be shy; everyone at the table convinced a manager to hire and pay them for their skills and experience. Do feel free to demand participation, but do so in a way that’s respectful and empathetic.
Always remember that the purpose of a team meeting is to create results. Today’s workplaces are diverse, and as the facilitator, you might have to change your own behavior to coax participation from people. Productive facilitators are flexible and know how to communicate with people who are different from themselves. If this is not a strength of yours, I recommend that you read ‘Non-Violent Communication’ by Dr. Marshall Rosenberg, it’ll really help.
Assign a Note-Taker and Give Clear Directions
The note-taker should not be the person who’s facilitating. The facilitator needs to manage the discussion, the speaking list, ask probing questions and prompt people. No one can effectively take notes and facilitate at the same time.
Notes should not be the verbatim discussion. They should include action items, deadlines and who’s responsible, as well as any critical updates and parking lot items.
The facilitator is accountable for the outcomes of the meeting and should, therefore, give the final say on how the notes are written. For instance, there may be too much detail from a side-conversation or not enough emphasis placed on an important topic. Inexperienced note-takers won’t always know what to include, or what sensitive information to exclude. This is why someone in a leadership capacity should always review meeting notes before they’re circulated.
End Team Meetings On-Time
This shows respect for people’s time and lets them plan their day around the meeting. It also sets standards and expectations for future meetings. A lot of folks have worked in places where meetings go past the end-time to accommodate the full agenda. This practice almost guarantees meetings will go over-time often, as people get comfortable going on tangents rather than staying focused and being concise.
And finally, if you expect people to arrive at your meeting on time, you should reciprocate by ending on time. It’s about mutual respect.
Follow-Up
Sometime after the meeting, send an email thanking folks for attending and attach the final meeting notes. I recommend doing this within a couple of days, as your notes will likely have important information that people need.
2020 is going to be the year of ‘Soft Skills’ in the #work place, yet I’ve never heard two people define them the same way. In one sentence – how do you define #softskills?
— Chris (@ChrisjBergen) January 18, 2020
Final Thoughts
There you have it, a simple recipe for effective and collaborative meetings. You’ll notice that the common themes include being strategic with the agenda, keeping the meeting on track, showing respect for meeting participants and managing the energy in the room. If you fill your meeting with engaged staff and follow these steps, I guarantee you’ll get better results from your meetings.
